Hawaii public schools have so far spent $26 million on new textbooks as part of the state’s transition to instructional materials for language arts and math in line with the Common Core.
Teachers statewide last school year began teaching under the Common Core standards — nationally crafted measures that aim to lay out what students should know and be able to do in reading and math from kindergarten to grade 12. Hawaii is one of 41 states to adopt the initiative.
The shift is not meant to limit what educators can teach, said Dewey Gottlieb, the Department of Education’s specialist for math, who helped vet materials.
"This move toward standardization — we’re not going to script teachers; we’re not trying to micromanage their everyday moves; we’re not trying to take away any instructional decisions," Gottlieb said Tuesday at a Board of Education meeting.
"We ask them to use the programs as a common starting point. It is in no way a script," he added. "We want teachers to feel that they can be creative and innovative with these core programs to best suit their students’ learning needs."
Gottlieb and Petra Schatz, the DOE’s specialist for language arts, said an inventory of what was being taught in the state’s 255 public schools found 288 different math curricula and 287 different reading curricula in use.
The DOE formed review committees, made up mostly of classroom teachers, that evaluated math and reading programs that met Common Core criteria.
The DOE selected a math program called Stepping Stones by Missouri-based Origo Education for pupils in kindergarten through fifth grade, and a program called Go Math by Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sixth through eighth grades.
The programs include textbooks and instructional hard copies as well as access to digital materials online.
About half of the state’s elementary schools are implementing the selected math program this year, while 80 middle schools are using the selected math texts for intermediate grades.
High-school grades will use math curricula jointly developed by the DOE and the University of Hawaii’s College of Education. Seventy-nine of the state’s high schools are using the materials this year.
"All of the high school programs that we reviewed did not meet that minimum threshold to be considered for adoption," Gottlieb said. "The teachers felt that the programs that were available for high school mathematics didn’t represent what Common Core was asking them to do."
For language arts, the DOE selected the Reading Wonders program by New York-based McGraw-Hill for students in kindergarten to the fifth grade, and the SpringBoard language arts program by The College Board, also of New York, for grades six through 12.
About three-fourths of elementary schools — or 130 schools — and half of the state’s 94 middle and high schools are implementing the selected language arts programs this school year.
BOE Chairman Don Horner likened the new materials to the latest version of a software program.
"This isn’t something we plucked off the shelf from the mainland and we’re basically implementing throughout the system from top down," Horner said. "I do think there’s a misconception on the part of the public and others that this is some sort of mandated government set of content that we’re supposed to teach. We had — have — Hawaii Content and Performance Standards. We had 1.0. We had 2.0. We now have 3.0. This, in my judgment, is 4.0."
