Educators talk of learning units in terms of credit hours, but Hawaii’s public schools are poised to move — gradually — toward a new approach that would make the expression meaningless.

It’s the “hours” part that could fade away, if the model of proficiency-based education is fully embraced, as some hope it will be. The idea is that it matters far less how much “seat time” the student puts in determining the credit earned; it’s more based on the student proving that he or she understands the material — and they’ll get more than one shot at proving it.

Kathy Bryant is a parent and a community facilitator who is watching this development with interest.

“At first blush you think this is a good thing,” Bryant said. “It enables students to learn at their own pace.

“The concept seems good, from our point of view at HE‘E. But it’s in the details: How is this going to work for all students statewide?”

Bryant is the communication coordinator for HE‘E. Minus the glottal stop that is officially part of the name, it’s an acronym for Hui for Excellence in Education, which is a coalition of groups drawn together initially by the public uproar over school furloughs a few years back. Since then, HE‘E has been active in public schools advocacy, most recently the “concept” Bryant mentioned, an update to a strategic plan that the Hawaii Department of Education has drafted, now making the rounds.

This plan has been touted as a “historic shift” by DOE assistant superintendent Stephen Schatz, in how the state defines student achievement, by focusing on preparing all students for college or careers.

“The plan provides clear expectations and targets for all of our schools,” he told a Star-Advertiser reporter earlier this month.

Proficiency-based education is one of the newer trends sweeping the nation’s schools, an initiative most aggressively pursued on a large scale in Oregon and New Hampshire, and on a small scale in myriad charter schools and individual districts. The reference in the updated strategic plan concerns social promotion of students from one grade to the next. It’s currently rare that students get held back.

The draft language prescribes instead that the DOE “implement proficiency-based advancement of students based on applicable standards of academic achievement, character development and socio-emotional progress.” The average high school sophomore might still be 15, in other words, but the stronger students might be a bit closer to graduation while the struggling ones likely will be getting extra help to keep up or catch up.

Much of this long-term vision is intertwined with the national education reform initiative known as Race to the Top; Hawaii’s own efforts in the Race movement are being underwritten by a $75 million grant.

For example: The “standards of academic achievement” in the strategic plan are the common core standards that the Board of Education formally adopted two years ago but are not yet fully incorporated into school practice. Hawaii is part of a consortium of 31 states that is developing a student assessment system that aligns with the standards under another Race to the Top federal grant.

School officials describe the transition toward the proficiency model as a process of taking “baby steps.” One of the initial building blocks is the recent expansion of a computerized “early-warning system,” a database that tracks various aspects of student performance, and is also capable of flagging the ones who may need intervention before they fall too far behind.

But there are so many other implications that remain in the misty future. For example, the conventional A-to-F grading system doesn’t fit as neatly in a system more concerned with passing mile markers. Grades tend to involve terms such as “Proficient” or “Highly Proficient,” and there can be a problem translating them into the four-point scale most colleges use in gauging admissions, said Jennifer McDermott of the Center for Educational Leadership, part of the University of Washington.

The center worked on the Oregon Proficiency Project, which rolled out three years ago. The project encountered some intense culture shock at the outset.

Example: In 2009 some of its students posted a Facebook open group titled “I Hate the Proficiency Scale.” Although it’s no longer active — complaints doubtlessly having moved off elsewhere — the early comments posted there are telling. In 2009 one student recoiled at the notion of a “Nearly Proficient” grade.

“What does this even mean?” the student wrote. “ You aren’t good enough to be OK?”

For their part, teachers don’t instantly grasp how to factor conventional considerations into the grades, McDermott added. Class participation, for instance, doesn’t fit as neatly into this type of assessment.

“Teachers felt confused with the grading system not changing at first,” she said. “If it’s still an A-F scale, how does this translate?

“And you get all these esoteric questions, like, ‘Why is a 15-year-old a sophomore? What makes someone a sophomore, proficiency or age?’

“It presses against the way we organize schools: grade levels, quarters,” McDermott added. “It really challenges our physical structures.”

That said, striving for some kind of hybrid system is a more usual approach, rather than making a radical break from the traditional classroom, she said. And, in her Oregon experience at least, teachers have been generally enthusiastic about working with a more fluid, “formative” assessment system.

“The teachers we were engaged with really wanted to try it on,” McDermott said. “Seeing that students over multiple attempts could achieve proficiency, teachers felt a great sense of relief over that.”

Even in Oregon, the transition is uneven, with variations from campus to campus. The best examples of proficiency-based education tend to be scattered.

A vanguard school McDermott cited is the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School of Chicago. Its website (www.ywlcs.org) describes its assessment system: “This standards-based system has five levels: Exemplary, High Performance, Proficient, Emerging, and Not Proficient. … Grades will be determined by the number of points earned out of the total number of points possible.”

The point scale described corresponds roughly with the standard A-F scale. And, to pass any class, students must show that they are either proficient (70-79 out of a possible 100 points) or high performing (80-89 points) in at least 70 percent of the defined targets for that class.

New Hampshire may be the state that’s furthest along, having piloted proficiency-based learning a decade ago. The state education department set the 2008-9 academic year as the deadline when school districts were to award credits according to proficiency rather than “seat time.” The work is still ongoing, according to multiple reports: Since teachers often “facilitate” learning rather than impart it, it’s been a big adjustment.

That adjustment, applied to Hawaii, is on an even greater scale. As the nation’s only state comprising a single school district, implementation will be more complex, said Cheryl Kauhane Lupenui, a BOE member who sees herself as a “student” of this model, just like everyone else.

“The fact that states are willing to share where they are in this model is extremely helpful,” Lupenui said. “This model will try to systematically change things, statewide, and that’s where the complexity comes in.”

Among the threads to be interwoven, she said, are determining how to deal with students’ multiple learning styles, shifting from a quarter system to all the multilevel phases of assessment, using means of grading other than standard tests and involving the broader school community.

“It’s not any one thing that’s new, it’s the integration of all that,” she said.

Education leaders here recognize that they’ve got a lot to learn from states about making it work, she added. On the other hand, this approach may be a more natural fit in Hawaii than some realize, Lupenui said.

“Hawaiian learning traditionally incorporates all of that — multidisciplinary, learning outside the classroom,” she said. “All of that is inherent in the way we learn. If you look at it at that deeper level, we’re already leaps ahead.”