Faced with Gov. Linda Lingle's 2004 push to break up Hawai'i's statewide school system, members of the Board of Education fought to save their jobs by embracing Act 51, a competing reform bill in the Legislature that promised to "reinvent" public education while saving the centralized system.

Now, the school board is grossly delinquent in enacting the centerpiece of Act 51 — a weighted budgeting formula to allocate money more fairly among schools.

Department of Education administrators diligently followed the law by devising a per-student budgeting scheme that gives added weight to students from poor families, non-English speakers, transfer students and smaller schools with higher costs per student.

But school board members balk at approving it because of a consequence that was obvious when they supported the law — some schools will lose money while others gain as long-standing inequities in DOE budgeting are set straight.

By ducking the politically painful call, the Board of Education is nearly six months behind schedule in approving a budgeting formula that must be in effect for the next school year.

Board members sent the matter back to committee for further discussion last week after voting it down outright the month before.

With schools running out of time to plan their 2006-2007 budgets, the board continues to thrash about to avoid tough decisions that could force some schools to give up money and some employees to transfer to other schools.

Some board members have sought to delay implementing key parts of the law or place caps on the amount schools can lose.

Others hope the Legislature will bail them out by providing tens of millions of dollars from the state surplus to compensate schools that would lose funding under the new formula.

A case can be made for using surplus funds to catch up on the massive backlog of repair and maintenance work in our dilapidated schools.

But when it comes to giving the DOE more money for year-to-year operating costs, not so fast.

Between 1974 and 2003, the DOE's inflation-adjusted operating expenses increased by 175 percent and DOE staffing increased by 96 percent, while student enrollment grew by only 3 percent.

This infusion of resources did virtually nothing to improve student achievement — suggesting that the problem is not funding, but the Board of Education's persistent inability to make the hard choices to spend wisely.

Let them prove they're capable of the decisions they're elected to make before we talk about more money.

And let them show that they see some urgency in fixing our underperforming schools.

To meet the current demands of the federal No Child Left Behind law, only 44 percent of public school students must be proficient in reading and 28 percent in math.

But two-thirds of public schools can't even achieve that despite all the money and staffing we've poured into the schools in the past 20 years.

With federal requirements tightening every year, there's no time for further delay while the school board tries to weasel out of its commitments.

It boils down to this:

If weighted spending is the magic bullet school board members swore it was when they lobbied for Act 51, they should enact it without further dithering.

If it's a bad idea that they endorsed only to save their political necks, we must revisit the idea of breaking up a school system that refuses to reform itself.

If the board won't grow a backbone and do its job, the only way left to help our students improve their reading and math skills is to cut this Board of Equivocation out of the story line, remove it from the equation.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.