As the state Legislature begins another session this month, the people of Hawaii need to realize the crucial role that it, and not the governor, plays in funding our K-12 public education system, which is underfunded. While Gov. Josh Green has proposed his next biennium state budget, the Legislature appropriates funds for public education, including for expenditures not requested by the governor or the state Department of Education (DOE).

According to news reports, Green’s budget proposes for fiscal year 2026, which begins in July of this year, $2.62 billion for the DOE (not including non-recurring expenses). That represents 14.6% of the total state budget and ranks third after the departments of Human Services and Budget and Finance. However, that percentage for the DOE is substantially less than the national average of 21.5% for state and local expenditures spent on K-12 public education, which places Hawaii among the lowest of states in that regard together with others such as Mississippi and Arkansas. While the public may believe that state taxes are being invested heavily in the educational system, including the University of Hawaii, that is not the case.

The governor’s proposed budget for the DOE — including $94 million annually for programs such as Hawaiian language immersion and advanced placement courses — appears to indicate that the DOE is well funded. However, those figures are dwarfed by the $530 million the Legislature allocated last year for constructing school facilities, a prime example of non-recurring expenses. Why didn’t legislators instead appropriate some of those monies for hiring more teachers for Hawaiian language and advanced placement courses or for more bus drivers, a problem which resulted in stranding almost 3,000 students at the start of the school year?

Even with that more-than-half-billion-dollar appropriation, the DOE cannot use those designated funds to address its most critical problem — the chronic teacher shortage. During the past several decades, the public schools have opened each year lacking a sufficient number of teachers. This deficit has been as high as more than a thousand instructors until the DOE began hiring Philippine teachers the past several years. Even those nearly 200 teachers have not solved the shortage problem because the DOE continues each year to employ several hundred emergency hires, who lack a teaching credential required to be a licensed teacher in Hawaii.

The persisting teacher shortage clearly demonstrates that the DOE budget provided by the Legislature is insufficient and has been for decades. Adequate funding would enable the DOE to offer salaries for the recruitment and retention of fully qualified teachers rather than to continue with the teacher shortage and hiring persons who are unqualified to teach.

The taxpaying parents of public school students and the students themselves are being shortchanged by the inadequate education provided to them because the Legislature does not consider K-12 education a policy priority in contrast to projects that increase their chances for reelection.

Note that approximately 70% of the nearly 170,000 DOE students are Native Hawaiian, Filipino or from other ethnic minorities, the same groups that are hugely underrepresented at University of Hawaii-Manoa and that persist in occupying the lower levels of the socioeconomic status order.

A group I work with, the Hawaii Scholars for Education and Social Justice, recently completed its fifth research brief, “The Chronic Underfunding of Hawaii’s Public Schools and Related Policy Recommendations,” that discusses the above and other related problems and issues. The paper’s other contributors are E. Brook Chapman de Sousa, Kay Fukuda, Janet Kim, Colleen Rost-Banik, Lois Yamauchi and Waynele Yu, all at UH-Manoa. It will be posted this month on the HSESJ website, hawaiischolars.weebly.com/research-briefs.

Jonathan Y. Okamura is professor emeritus at UH-Manoa, where he was a faculty member for more than 30 years, mostly with the Department of Ethnic Studies.