Test flaws anger
school officialsThe department is still studying
the potential effects of the errors
on standardized exams
Schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto said yesterday that education officials are angered and disappointed with errors in flawed statewide tests for tens of thousands of public school students.
The errors were found in the instructions, sample answers and some answers themselves in tests developed for the Hawaii State Assessment, a series of tests that determine which schools meet federal standards and which face sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Responding to a Honolulu Star-Bulletin article yesterday about the errors, Hamamoto said that although the company that developed the tests has offered to "send a letter of apology to each school," much more must be done to fix the problem.
"We are very concerned. ... The right word may be 'angry,'" Hamamoto said, "because we put so much stock in the need to have the assessment piece so that we're able to know how well our kids are doing, as well as how well the system's doing.
"A letter of apology does not take into account what has already occurred and what is about to happen."
Hamamoto said that officials from Harcourt Assessment Inc., the San Antonio-based company that developed the tests as part of a five-year, $20 million contract with the state, must still provide the Department of Education with correct test results by Aug. 1, as agreed to in the contract.
Along with identifying the errors and getting accurate test results for students, Hamamoto said she wants to know how this happened and an assurance that it will not occur again.
"What does it say about them, when you take into account the amount of money that we put in as well as the time and effort and belief that this is going to help us?" she said.
The tests were given in March and April to students in grades 3, 5, 8 and 10, involving math, reading and writing this year, and some students in grades 4, 6 and 7 took new tests that are being evaluated for next year.
Exactly how many students were affected by the flawed tests is still being determined, said education officials. Part of the problem is that there are so many different forms of the tests -- about 30 versions -- that errors are hard to track down and verify.
"It's not just one test per grade," said Selvin Chin-Chance, head of the Department of Education's Test Development Section. "There may be four forms of the tests in each grade for just for reading ... another four for math.
"It's a huge amount of forms we have to keep track of."
Hamamoto said most of the test errors are small enough that the department will not have to disregard entire test scores. However, she said only if an entire section of the test was found to have errors, than retesting the student would become a possibility.
"That would be the last resort," she said.