The federal government’s main benchmark for measuring the performance of public schools — the much-maligned No Child Left Behind feature known as "adequate yearly progress" — has come under deserved criticism for its rigid adherence to standardized test scores. Now Hawaii wants to join 33 other states in obtaining a waiver from key provisions of NCLB in an effort to revamp its accountability system for schools.

There are good reasons for doing so. First, AYP’s primary emphasis on test scores in reading and math has distorted educational goals. Schools that don’t reach testing benchmarks, even by a factor of a single student, are considered "failing," and face sanctions regardless of whether they are making important progress in other areas. It’s a dubious incentive for schools to teach to the test.

And that pressure will only ratchet up. NCLB requires every school to achieve 100 percent grade-level proficiency by 2014. That almost surely won’t happen, no matter how much time and money Hawaii’s school system pours into raising test scores.

These are the main reasons why other states have taken advantage of a U.S. Department of Education waiver program, which was introduced by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan after failed attempts to convince a hyper-partisan Congress to update the Bush-era NCLB rules.

Critics of the waiver program accuse the Obama administration of unilaterally overriding federal education law, using the carrot of federal funding to impose its agenda on public schools.

Nonetheless, Hawaii has been a willing participant in federal educational reforms. It accepted $75 million in Race to the Top funds in exchange for adopting college and career-ready standards; upgrading data systems used to measure student progress; introducing more sophisticated teacher and principal evaluations; and focusing on turning around the lowest-achieving schools.

These goals are good ones, regardless of their source, and the waivers give states more freedom to craft new, more flexible standards to meet them. Even so, AYP won’t go away entirely. Standardized test scores will continue to play a principal role, as they should.

But the ability to balance other performance indicators makes sense, too. For instance, graduation rates and college readiness are critical measures for high schools, while for elementary schools, student growth and increasing proficiency in core subjects like math and reading need more emphasis by evaluators.

The state DOE’s accountability plan would use a new measuring tool called the Hawaii Academic Performance Index, a complex set of measurements to calculate student achievement, growth and readiness of two primary groups: high-needs students and all other students. Depending on their progress, schools would be classified into Reward, Continuous Improvement, Focus and Priority schools.

It’s not certain how schools, parents and students would adapt to this new accountability system. The current AYP pass/fail system at least has the advantage of the clarity of numbers: Test scores can be easily compared from year to year, even if the conclusions drawn from them are debatable.

The last thing Hawaii’s public school system needs is a more complicated, murky accountability system understood only by education bureaucrats. It’s critical that the DOE provide the parents and the public with clear, plain-English explanations of how their schools are doing.

Schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi says the new system, if approved, would be "a huge sea change" in how Hawaii public schools are evaluated.

She is right, and there’s more at stake than federal funding. The present and future education of Hawaii’s children rests on the school system’s ability to continually improve — and on the ability of the public to monitor this progress.