Equality in Hawaii

"Education, of course, is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our federal Constitution." With those chilly words by Justice Lewis F.

Powell, a 5-to-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court last March struck down a Texas lawsuit that aimed at greater equality of spending in education. Although it may be unjust for wealthy school districts to have more money to spend on education, the court said, these inequities in local taxes* should be solved by the states and local communities themselves. Since then, a number of them have been trying to do just that.

State legislatures in Kansas, North Dakota and Utah have already approved increases in the state share of school funding (example: up from 28% to 49% in Kansas); those in Florida and Illinois are expected to take similar action later this year. Meanwhile, the battle is continuing in the courts, for despite the Supreme Court's ruling, a number of state constitutions require equality of educational opportunity. In New Jersey, the state supreme court used those grounds to throw out the school funding system based on widely varying local property taxes.

Led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, attorneys and school finance experts are pursuing a common strategy for court suits now pending in about 30 states. Says Stephen Browning, a member of the committee: "We're going to have to prove conclusively in each state that unequal resources create unequal educational opportunities, which in turn lead to unequal achievement by the students."

Such a connection may prove difficult to demonstrate. A number of experts--including Sociologists James S. Coleman of Johns Hopkins and Christopher S. Jencks of Harvard--argue that more spending does little to improve a child's achievement in school, and that the school itself is less important in his development than the home.

The only state in the Union that has no autonomous local districts--and thus treats all pupils the same--is Hawaii. Money for education is raised principally through income and excise taxes and portioned out at roughly $930 per student. The schools' physical facilities are of equal quality, they have about the same pupil-teacher ratio (26 to 1) and even the same menus at the cafeterias. Slightly more money is spent in low-income areas because of federal programs intended to help the poor.

Pidgin English. Nonetheless, this Utopia of equality produces results that are similar to those on the mainland. Honolulu's Kahala Elementary School and Palolo Elementary School, for instance, have similar buildings (concrete blocks, carpeted floors), employ similarly skilled teachers, and use the same curriculum. Yet on uniform tests, the children in Kahala score roughly twice as high as Palolo's students.

School administrators blame the differences mostly on the students' family backgrounds. Kahala is situated in a high-income neighborhood where the homes sell for close to $ 100,000. Its student body is predominantly white and middle class. Palolo is near a public housing project, and almost 40% of the students come from welfare families. The Palolo youngsters are primarily of Oriental or Polynesian background, and many hear only pidgin English at home. Fighting is commonplace at Palolo, and the truancy rate is high. Outside of Honolulu, the discrepancies grow even wider. On the northeast coast of Oahu, for instance, the farm youngsters' scores on some standard tests were about 50% lower than even those at Palolo.

Remedial programs have not improved matters. Says Don Enoki, project coordinator for the federally funded Follow Through Program: "The students seem to be holding their own with other schools in low-income areas, but they are not making significant gains on the affluent schools." Adds Honolulu Superintendent Albert Miya-sato: "Federal money doesn't seem to have had much effect. But we rationalize that by saying that if we didn't have the programs we would probably lose more children than we do now."

Although equal school financing does not solve all problems, Hawaii officials nonetheless believe their system is better than the haphazard disparities on the mainland. Superintendent Miyasato, who once supervised teacher training at the University of Southern California, recalls that "some of the schools I visited were so different I couldn't believe I was in the same state. Here, there is at least a semblance of similarity. Unity of purpose is the big thing."

* In the Baldwin Park section of Los Angeles, for example, citizens pay $5.66 per $100 of assessed real estate to raise only $715 per student; in wealthy Beverly Hills, $3.20 raises $1,541. In industrial Bridgeport, Conn., a tax rate of $12.10 produces only $620 per pupil while the rich suburb of Greenwich gets $1,000 on a rate of $7.50.

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