It is far from a new observation, but Congressman Neil Abercrombie — now running for governor — put an amusing and colorful spin on the troubles facing Hawai'i's public school system the other day.

The problem, as people have pointed out for years, is that no one is truly in charge. We have a Department of Education bureaucracy, now ably led by Pat Hamamoto, which is in charge of the day-to-day business of keeping the school train on its tracks.

Then we have a popularly elected Board of Education that is supposed to represent public sentiment and set broad educational goals and policies. This the board does, but it also slips into micromanagement from time to time.

The governor is not involved in administrative details — less so than ever since the DOE was granted a level of political autonomy. But the governor has the final say on when and how money is released and where it goes.

Then there are three unions (one for support workers, one for teachers and one for principals) who rightfully demand their own say in what goes on in the schools.

Finally, we have the Legislature, which is supposed to look at broad public policy issues (should more money go to education, social services, the environment or whatever?) but, in reality, sets educational policy in a thousand ways with mandates, provisos and new programs that must be somehow crammed into an already busy school schedule.

So, that's the picture Abercrombie was talking about the other day.

"We've got kind of a rectangular firing squad with the Legislature, the unions, the governor and the Board of education and everybody points to everybody else as the culprit or culprits and meanwhile the students and the parents are left on the sidelines," Abercrombie said.

Not a bad analysis.

Abercrombie's comments came in the wake of a second salvo from the federal Department of Education on Hawai'i's ill-thought-out decision to ease the budget crunch in the school system by instituting a series of "furlough Fridays" where teachers would get the day off without pay — a pay cut — and the kids would simply have to find something else to do. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has already blasted this approach. And in a recent visit to Hawai'i, Assistant Secretary Peter Cunningham made it clear "there must be a better solution."

A better solution will come. It is clear that the furlough Friday plan is a dead letter. Everyone is embarrassed by it. What replaces it, whether it is dipping into the limited rainy day fund, forcing teachers to give up hard-won preparation days or other solutions remain to be seen.

But this is a political moment of great promise. We are about to embark on a major election year, one in which a new governor will be chosen. Abercrombie has identified the problem; now it is incumbent that he define a solution. His Democratic primary opponent, Mayor Mufi Hannemann, has yet to speak much about education but he surely has ideas of his own.

On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona can try to revive the idea tossed out by his boss, Gov. Linda Lingle, which was to break up the statewide school system into a more community-based system of local school boards. Or, he may have his own ideas.

In any case, the crisis over school funding provides an unusual opportunity to rethink our school system in the context of an important political season. Let's hope the opportunity is not lost.