As a high school science teacher, one of the important skills I taught my students was how to ask the right questions.

Here’s a story I would share with them:

During the Cold War space race, the U.S. asked the question, “How do we make a pen that can work in outer space?” After about $1 million worth of research and development, NASA created an expensive, high-tech ballpoint pen that can work in any type of gravity.

The Soviets, on the other hand, asked the question: “How do write in outer space?” They gave their astronauts a pencil. It worked just fine.

Asking the right question is important.

Right now our Hawaii Department of Education and teachers’ union are asking the question, “How do we improve the teacher evaluation system?”

This is a vital question since we have already invested so much time and money into the initiative, but the more fundamental question we should be asking is, “How do improve the quality of teachers in Hawaii?”

The idea of using an evaluation system to improve teacher quality came from people like Bill Gates who decided they could fix education without any actual input from educators.

The average teacher’s salary in Hawaii is anywhere from 20 to 90 percent lower than in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — all of which have lower costs of living.

Since then, Microsoft has abandoned their employee evaluation system because their own workers cited the system as “the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees” (“Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” by Kurt Eichenwald in Vanity Fair).

The new teacher evaluation system may or may not ever truly work, but more importantly, it does not address the major flaw in our state: we can filter out our teachers all we want, but we have little incentive to bring in high quality teachers to replace the ones who are leaving.

In order to truly elevate the quality of teachers in Hawaii, we need to focus on recruiting and retaining the best educators in our teacher workforce, not on increasing the effectiveness of whichever warm bodies we can find.

If you ask any sort of business leader whether they would spend more time recruiting the best team or taking the first people that apply and improving them, the answer would obviously be “recruiting.”

Yet this is not the approach that we are taking by spending time and money on the evaluation system. Right now the average teacher’s salary in Hawaii is anywhere from 20 to 90 percent lower than in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — all of which have lower costs of living.

Additionally, a starting teacher with a dependent spouse and child would automatically be eligible for food stamps.

In such circumstances, we shouldn’t be  surprised when 56 percent of our teachers quit within their first five years. Although increasing teacher salary would certainly be expensive, how much has implementing the evaluation system cost us? And how much does it cost to replace the thousands of teachers that leave every year?

Improving the recruitment and retention of the best educators would require many parties, including the Legislature, the governor’s office, the Department of Education, and the teachers’ union to agree on one central tenet: the funding that goes toward our teachers is not an expense that we must cover, but an investment that we must intentionally make.

We should not be paying our teachers as little as we can get away with; we should make the profession of teaching attractive and competitive so that we get and keep the best.

One thing is certain: if we do not make big adjustments, we should not expect big results.

After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.