Isle DOE tightens
school standards

Hawaii public schools should benefit from a streamlined new version of the state's academic standards, which should be easier to teach and learn but no less challenging, school officials said yesterday.

Schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto, members of the Board of Education and other school officials sought to explain the new standards at a news conference called yesterday to clear up "misperceptions" that they were "lowering the bar" academically to boost state test scores.

As is done every few years, the new set of standards condenses and reorganizes much of the wide-ranging body of knowledge and skills that students are expected to know, Hamamoto said.

The revised standards will be fully implemented beginning in the 2006-07 school year, as will a new version of the Hawaii State Assessment test that will be based on the new standards.

The number of overall standards -- broad concepts that public-school students must learn -- will decrease to 75 from 139 in the current version.

This is being done not by eliminating chunks of content but by "collapsing" together many existing standards and eliminating overlap, school officials said.

Teachers also will be required to teach specific things by certain grade levels. Previously, some standards were required to be taught at some point within a range of grades, which caused gaps and overlap in instruction, officials said.

The overall aim is to make the complicated standards -- which numbered more than 1,500 at one point in the 1990s -- more manageable for teachers and students, Hamamoto said.

"I wish I had this when I was a principal," she said.

Department of Education officials stressed that the revision was not an attempt to help schools comply with the No Child Left Behind law by making it easier to pass the state test.

At the same time, school districts can little afford to have standards and curricula that are poorly focused in the era of the No Child Left Behind law, which places sanctions on schools that don't attain steadily higher scores on standards-based tests.

Last week, results of this year's HSA showed a lack of progress in some grade levels and some subject areas, though there were bright spots as well.

"(The revision) is not about dumbing things down but about removing some of the clutter so that hopefully it will be easier to retain," said department spokesman Greg Knudsen.

School systems across the country have been narrowing down a proliferation of standards that occurred in the 1970s, when it was felt that large numbers of highly detailed standards aided education, said Randy Hitz, dean of the University of Hawaii's College of Education.

"If you have too many standards, it becomes meaningless. You can't teach them all. You need to focus on the important ones," he said.