Honolulu Civil Beat just dropped a lengthy article on Hawai‘i's charter schools, "Hawai‘i Charter Schools Promised a New Model. Did They Succeed?"
The occasion for reporter Megan Tagami's article is that 2025 is the 30th anniversary of Hawai‘i's and it's worth a read for a broad overview of where the charter schools are at. As someone who covered public education extensively, yes, some 30 years ago, I have a couple of observations.
First, there's the bottom line in Civil Beat's piece:
"Charter schools as a whole have not led to an increase in student achievement, with less than half of charter students proficient in English last year and nearly a third proficient in math — lower than the statewide average. But many principals say charters excel in other areas of education that aren’t measured by standardized tests, including family engagement and innovation."
Not great news, but missing some nuance. And to be fair, the data behind that nuance is missing, too, as far as I know. I always thought the most critical measure of academic success for the charter schools was whether or not a given individual student performed better academically at their charter school than they had in the regular DOE government (public) schools. That was the whole point of creating an alternative system.
However, when I've looked for this data in the past, no one ever seemed to measure it. Now, it may be impossible. The schools are old enough that some, perhaps many of the kids, have only ever attended a charter school and don't have DOE school test scores to compare their performance against.
We can get at this through proxy measures, however. As Tagami observes, "The state charter school commission has wrestled with how to hold schools academically accountable, while also recognizing that some campuses are drawing high numbers of struggling students, said Tom Hutton, who served as director of the commission from 2013 to 2016."
So one possible way to know if the struggling kids are more engaged in their charter schools would be to look at absenteeism rates, which have been abysmal statewide in the DOE schools since the Covid lockdowns.
Here the charter schools have had some success.
For the 2020-2021 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate throughout the charter system was 14% versus 18% statewide (scroll to page 519 at the link). In 2021-2022, the charter schools had a rate 33% versus 37% statewide. In 2022-2023, the charter schools fell slightly behind, 31% to 30%.
Showing up more often has got to be better than nothing.
Another thing the article leaves out is the fiscal disadvantage faced by the charter schools, though it seems like CB will get into budgets in the next installment.
Though they are public schools, the charter schools get no funding for facilities unless they are among the original four conversion charter schools, such as Wai‘alae Elementary, which launched at existing DOE-owned campuses. The Board of Education, in its annual reports on the charter schools, has said that facility costs eat up as much as 30% of an independent charter school's budget.
It seems unfair, to me, to gong the charter schools for their academic performance when generations of Hawai‘i state lawmakers have deliberately crippled the movement financially. How much more education could they have provided if they lived rent-free the way DOE schools do?
State government, at large, has always been hostile to having an internal competitor to its main DOE system. One example of this, which is missing from CB's otherwise good timeline of the 30-year history, is that Hawai‘i capped the number of charter schools to 23. That anti-competitive pressure preserved the DOE's monopoly on public education until it was finally scrapped in 2012. As CB notes, there are now 40 charter schools statewide.
The DOE still has a thumb on the scale when it comes to charter schools. The State Public Charter School Commission, which grants and occasionally revokes charters, is answerable to the Board of Education. This always struck me as unfair — would you let Chevrolet, for example, have the deciding vote on whether or not Toyota can sell in America?
Still, the charter schools do have much wider latitude to serve their students, design unique curricula and be more responsive to parents.
The most recent Board of Education report, just out this month, lists all the Board of Education policies that do and do not apply to charter schools. There are 187 that do not apply, and just 12 that do. Charter schools are free to come up with their approach to such things are character education; mission, vision and values; student promotion, class size and more. The 12 that do apply include collective bargaining (yes, charter school teachers are still unionized state workers) and statewide assessments.
In its first of three parts, this CB series seems to want to declare the charter school movement a disappointment. I think others would say that a fully independent and unfettered charter school system in Hawai‘i has yet to be tried.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
