The rift in the Department of Education exposed by an independent survey of principals and subsequent, unsuccessful calls for the state superintendent’s dismissal reflects more than burnout among campus administrators shouldering heavier workloads in the Race to the Top era.

Underlying the dissent for some educators is the feeling that they’ve been misled: that the school-level empowerment promised as an offshot of scrapping Hawaii’s elected statewide Board of Education with one appointed by the governor simply has not materialized.

Reconciling the admirable, overarching goals of the DOE’s Strategic Plan with those past pledges of decentralization and autonomy — espoused as a key element of the appointed-board movement and embraced by Gov. Neil Aber- crombie as a guiding principle of his winning gubernatorial campaign four years ago — must be a high priority for the BOE and Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi moving forward.

Reaching systemwide goals — higher graduation rates, for example — in ways that best suit individual school communities is the path to sustainable educational achievement. Students, parents, teachers and principals know best what their schools require. The central office should exist to fill those needs, not to tell schools what they need in the first place.

Adopting this mindset requires a philosophical shift on the part of some DOE employees, perhaps even some BOE members, but it needs to occur. A decade after the passage of Act 51, the law that was supposed to reinvent education in Hawaii, perennial complaints about top-down directives persist, as the principals’ survey starkly revealed.

Although appointed, the school board remains accountable to the governor, and through him, to the voters of Hawaii. Realizing the full potential of this more strategic, efficient appointed BOE means also recognizing what has been lost in the transition: a sense of broad public access and input.

The board should take immediate steps to restore broader access, adapting its meeting schedule if necessary to hold more decisionmaking sessions in the evenings when working people can attend in greater numbers.

The board voted last week to extend Matayoshi’s employment for three years, a contract offer that comes with the prospect of a $100,000 annual raise — assuming the governor signs the bill approved last legislative session that raises the superintendent’s maximum salary from $150,000 to $250,000 a year and that the board awards the full amount.

A raise of any amount should come with strings attached, and fully addressing the concerns of principals who responded to the independent survey should be one of them. An action plan is in order, not a report rehashing the information, which was collected in April by a retired principal; he garnered responses from 160 of 255 sitting principals, shared the poll findings with the media, and, with others, appealed in vain for the BOE not to renew Matayoshi’s contract.

Now, as those contract terms are finalized, the BOE must make public the criteria by which Matayoshi’s performance will be graded in the future — it did not do so during her most recent annual evaluation, which resulted in an "exceptional" rating — to ensure that the principals’ concerns are corroborated and corrected.

To her credit, Matayoshi has pledged to resolve some of the major problems cited in the survey, such as the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system that is overwhelming campus-level administrators because it takes so much time to assess every teacher twice a year.

This week, she plans to announce improvements she said will ease the burden on principals while ensuring that teachers are evaluated fairly, for example. The improvements should be concrete and immediate.

In the current divisive climate it will take extraordinary communication and leadership from Matayoshi to further the progress of Hawaii’s sprawling school system. Validating the importance of school-level empowerment within a state-level strategic plan would go a long way to reassure students, parents, teachers and principals that improvements cited recently in our public schools are sustainable well into the future.