Former Kaiser High School Principal John Sosa has experienced the highs and lows of working in Hawaii’s public schools more intensely than most Department of Education employees.

In May 2013 he was honored as the best high school principal in the state, hailed as a tireless leader who had elevated the Hawaii Kai school to lofty international standards. That September, the DOE abruptly placed him on administrative leave along with two office staff, accused of unspecified fraud.

It was an ignoble end to what had been an acclaimed 44-year career in the DOE, including years as a teacher, principal and district administrator. At Kaiser, Sosa led teachers and students in implementing the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum. Standardized test scores rose, as did extracurricular involvement and parent engagement. Empowering school-level employees — especially principals — to meet the needs of their individual school communities was his mantra.

Now, eight months later, the DOE’s internal investigation remains unresolved. Sosa, who maintains his innocence, retired in December. He hasn’t stopped caring about Hawaii’s public schools, and is speaking out in the wake of an independent survey that found broad discontent in the principal ranks about the direction of the DOE, especially the central state office that oversees Hawaii’s single school district.

Darrel Galera, the retired Moanalua High School principal who conducted the survey, shares Sosa’s beliefs about school empowerment. Together with others, they are urging educators to speak up about the impact of Race to the Top reforms on their schools and on their students.

“If any organization should be collaborative and provide an opportunity for active discourse — even if the discourse is against what you’re trying to do — it should be educational organizations,” said Sosa. “We should actively promote that.”

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QUESTION: What do you hope to achieve with this survey, short term and long term?

ANSWER: In the short term, what we’re hoping to achieve is simply informing the public about the reality of what’s happening in the schools. … The survey results speak for themselves. …  I think it says a lot as to the status of the current reforms at the schools, the frustration that people are feeling and the fact that it needed to be said from the principals’ viewpoint without any filtering. … 

For the principals, the frustration was that we could see disaster coming. And we kept giving feedback, but it wasn’t being heard, or maybe it was being heard, but it wasn’t being listened to, and there certainly weren’t any adjustments that were being made to help us make it more effective in the schools. …  

Q: When you say that you could see the disaster coming, what do you mean? 

A: Well, I do think that you’re going to see the effects of overworking principals, overworking teachers, taking away from the focus on teaching. That was predictable. We saw that coming. We knew that (the teacher-evaluation system) was not sustainable, because the way the model was put together — simply the amount of time that it takes to do this, from year to year to year, is not sustainable. The DOE’s response is that we’re going to do it this way the first year and we’re going to collect data and then we’re going to adjust.

Q: You’re referring to the evaluations of every single teacher?

A: Correct, two times a year. And I have nothing against evaluation. I think teacher evaluation is important. But there are lots of models out there that can be done efficiently and with purpose and are sustainable in terms of the resources required. … No evaluation system in and of itself is going to improve student learning.

Q: Reading the survey, there’s a sense that Race to the Top is getting more credit than it deserves for improvements. Do principals have less time to focus on priorities for their schools? 

A: Yes. Teachers, too. Whatever programs are working for your students in your community get less attention because you have to meet the demands of the state office. That’s the other part that I think gets lost in this one-size, top-down model — the diversity of the communities is not recognized. There’s got to be flexibility for the school administrator and teachers to put programs into place that serve their distinct populations. … 

There are many schools that have terrific drama programs, art programs, PE programs, academic programs, like for example, at Kaiser, the International Baccalaureate program, the Advanced Placement program, the Computer-Technical Education program; at Waipahu, the schools-within-a-school model, the academies. … Now all the concentration is on these state initiatives. … 

Q: So what’s your answer?

A: It’s about empowering the schools, turning the system upside down. What drives change is resources, and the resources that we have at the school level are money, time and personnel. 

Money in terms of flexible money to implement programs; personnel is driven by money also, and time is fixed. You only have so many hours in the day. So if you put the control of 

90 percent of those resources at the school level, that’s where the power is and you allow principals then to build their structures based on the funding that they have. 

Weighted student formula (WSF) was an effort to try to do that with schools and it has gotten watered down over the years, to the point that now the central system is saying “You’ll use your WSF money to do this.”

Q: So that’s the long-term goal?

A: Yes, to try to effect some change to really put the funding in the control of the schools because that’s where the ability to change makes a difference for the students. … 

Q: It seems like we’ve gone in the opposite direction, toward greater centralization …  Has it gone too far? Could it even be reversed at this point?

A: I do think it has gone too far, but I also think it can be reversed. We have a condition now that we did not have before, and that is the appointed school board. The governor has the power to appoint the board, and the board hires the superintendent, so there’s direct responsibility for the system. If the governor were to say, I want to work toward empowering schools, and I want you, school board, to come up with a plan to do that and work with the superintendent to implement it; we’re in a position now that it could be done.

Q: That requires the governor to share this vision.

A: Yes, and it would require leadership that truly believes in empowering schools, and not in a top-down approach. Because the reverse has happened. Because the governor appoints the board and the board appoints the superintendent, they decided to do this Race to the Top, and they lined up these state initiatives, and just basically said, “This is what we’re going to do.” The same thing could be done with empowerment.

Q: Especially since we are going to run out of Race to the Top money?

A: It’s not just about money, but certainly that is a question. That’s what we kept trying to express. Is this sustainable? Empowerment is sustainable. 

Q: The survey detected a pretty demoralized working environment. 

A: Yes. … For example, there are a lot of people, myself included, who were put on leave. We’re put on leave. We’re not told what it is that we did that was so egregious that we need to be removed from our positions and the investigations drag on for months and sometimes years. … We don’t even know how many people out there are in this situation, because it’s done individually and we kind of go in our little cocoon and then we wait. It’s demoralizing, it’s embarrassing, you get angry, you get frustrated, you get scared. … I was never given an opportunity to talk to my superiors as to what it is that they viewed as problems. … 

I don’t care if a principal has one year of service, or, in my case, 44 years of service: People shouldn’t be treated this way. They should be dealt with in a manner that brings forth whatever the concerns are, and if the goal is to improve and make things right, then work with them to do that, and if there’s something so egregious that they have to be dismissed, then the facts should speak for themselves in the investigation. But they need to be told that right up front. … 

(Editor’s note: Sosa, one of three Kaiser employees put on leave for alleged fraud, said he did not steal school money and never knowingly violated DOE administrative rules. He hopes that his name will be cleared.)

Q: In a way, does the slowness of the internal investigations reflect the overall system response? I mean, how long did it take to get the Kaiser High scoreboard fixed?

A: It’s not done yet. It’s been seven years, going on eight, and it’s still not done, as far as I know. … That’s what I mean. There are elements of the (DOE bureaucracy) that are simply not functioning properly. … The facilities and repairs system, the personnel system, these huge central systems that are not responsive to the needs of individual schools.  …

Q: Taking out the element of the internal investigations, because that seems like a separate issue, but just thinking about the Race to the Top initiatives, the DOE might say, “Change is hard, and we understand that this has been a wrenching year and this is the worst of it, and once we get through it, it will be better and we’ll see wonderful outcomes for the students.” … 

A: I don’t feel like we’re going to have the results that they are touting, which is that … student learning will improve. The collection of data lends itself to having a lot of information that you can then spin however you want to spin it, and you can find data points that say we’re doing better than we were before. I understand that. But I think that if you’re really transparent about the data, you not only have to identify those things that got better, but you also have to identify those things that got worse.

Q: We’ve talked a lot about the system. What should individual principals do? …

A: I think they have to stand up and be counted. The system can be changed, but it’s going to take the principals coming forth, the active sitting principals. Mr. Galera and I can stand out here and bellow all we want, and people will just label us as discontents and say, “So what, they’re out of the system now.” We have nothing to gain by this. … Yet, public education is so important that we must speak up. Principals have to implement these initiatives in a way that makes sense for our schools, because we are responsible to our teachers, we are responsible to our parents and we are responsible to our students.