On Dec. 2, the Advertiser's banner headline read: "Schools await fixes: $525M and growing." But the half-billion-dollar fix-up job doesn't tell the whole story. A couple months earlier, this newspaper published a thoughtful opinion piece by Heather Harris, a Leeward Coast-based public school teacher, who described the abysmal physical conditions teachers and students have to contend with.

More importantly, she illustrated the psychological impact this shoddy environment fosters. To quote Harris: "The message that these buildings send to the students and teachers are that these students don't matter."

Harris has a simple but compelling point. The physical surroundings in which we live and work have an inordinately powerful influence on behavior. This is hardly original, but it's something that the state Department of Education must not lose sight of. Broken tables and chairs, malfunctioning air conditioning and decrepit, smelly toilets all have a negative impact on students' ability to learn and teachers' capability to teach.

This parallels a dictum known popularly as the "broken windows theory," which comes from a study by George Kelling, a criminal justice researcher who found that neighborhoods left to fester with signs of urban decay such as graffiti, junked cars, overgrown lawns, accumulated trash and yes, broken windows, are the seed for bigger problems. They tend to erode the health of a neighborhood, which inevitably leads to petty crimes such as drug dealing, theft, prostitution and other activities.

Broken windows, says the author of the study, are a metaphor. If you've got broken windows, you'd better fix them and fix them quickly. Otherwise, it's a signal that no one cares and leads to more deterioration if left unattended.

The upshot, says Kelling, is that fixing small things matters — sometimes even more than big things.

The broken-window theory was first advanced about 20 years ago and put into practice by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, a take-command kind of guy who became an even bigger legend after 9/11, used the philosophy to turn his city around. In doing so, Big Apple crime rates fell spectacularly during the Giuliani regime. William Bratton, the police commissioner, translated Kelling's broken-windows thesis into "order maintenance," or aggressive enforcement of laws against nuisance offenses, which in turn led to the decrease in crime and an overall higher quality of life.

The implications for our schools are easy to see. We need to embark uncompromisingly on a program that will fix our broken infrastructure. Just as Giuliani cleaned up the Big Apple, our elected officials must take responsibility for their own blackboard jungle.

Whereas we generally don't have to worry about serious crimes in our schools, the impact of well-maintained buildings with quiet, spotless classrooms, desks and chairs free of graffiti and working air conditioning systems can only have a positive effect on our children's learning capabilities. Instead of saying "we don't care about your education," a good physical environment implies that the state wants the very best for its students.

Naturally, the message is not lost on teachers. As Harris so eloquently noted, until lawmakers invest in our public school infrastructure, qualified teachers from Mainland institutions — whom we so desperately need — will continue to make Hawai'i a "migratory stopover." Here they will gain valuable experience in their first two years of teaching and then move elsewhere, taking their credentials with them.

As a company that has run a nonprofit educational program for high school and middle school students for a number of years, we would never consider providing a learning environment for children that was shoddy or substandard. To do so would defeat the purpose of education.

Fixing windows, however, goes beyond brick and mortar. In addition to the 20th-century technology that needs to be fixed, i.e., the roof, the air conditioner, the toilets, etc., we need to deploy 21st-century technology such as communications and virtual classroom software that can offer students a 21st-century education.

This begs the question, now that we have a state budget surplus: Why not use it to fix our schools? The good news is that the governor in her State of the State speech appropriated some of the budget surplus for school maintenance. However, the $90 million in additional money for school construction and repairs is not nearly enough to deal with the maintenance backlog that has built up over the years.

We need a more serious commitment to go beyond paint and roofing. We must build schools that we can take pride in as community educational centers. I like the idea of getting a tax rebate check in the mail, but I'd gladly trade the money that the state is willing to send me in return for a remodeled school with 21st-century educational technology.

To do otherwise would be a slap in the face to our must vulnerable population — our children.

Mike Meyer is president of CTA, a high-technology consulting firm based in Honolulu, and a founder of HiTech Quest (www.hitechquest.com), a Honolulu-based nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering technology education for Hawai'i youth. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.