Now A Dispute Over What's Not In Teacher Contract

The Hawaii State Teachers Association has yet another complaint against the state, but this one isn't about what is in the contract Gov. Neil Abercrombie imposed on teachers in July. It's about what's not in it.

The state promised in its Race to the Top application that it would implement evaluations for all the state's 12,500 teachers by 2014. Toward that end, the Department of Education plans to pilot new teacher evaluation models in designated Zones of School Innovation this year. The problem is that the new teacher contract — already controversial in its own right — makes no mention of the evaluation trials.

The union says they should have been negotiated, and the department says negotiations were unnecessary because the teachers affected are already on board. The pilot will have no bearing on their official records anyway, the department says.

Union President Wil Okabe is disappointed, he wrote in a July 25 letter to Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi, that the department plans to bypass the collective bargaining process in order to implement the pilot project. He said state law "requires that the terms of an evaluation system be collectively bargained," citing Chapter 89 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, and requested that she reconsider the decision to implement the trial evaluations without negotiations.

"An effective teacher evaluation system requires a collaborative process that is based on trust and fairness," he wrote.

Okabe told Civil Beat that the specific statute he had in mind when he wrote the letter was Section 89-10.8, part 3, which talks about the grievance procedure for employee failure to meet performance standards.

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