Calling its teacher evaluation system too complicated and "too one-size-fits-all," the state Department of Education on Thursday announced more than a dozen changes to essentially cut in half the workload required to prepare for and perform the annual reviews, which teachers and principals have bemoaned since the rollout last fall.

"We’re looking at a pretty significant reduction in the amount of time that is required to complete teacher evaluations,"schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said at a news conference Thursday. "We have basically three themes to the modifications: simplify, streamline and differentiate (the approach for teachers based on need)."

Overhauling teacher evaluations was a key pledge in the state’s application for its $75 million federal Race to the Top grant. Starting next school year, a teacher’s rating will be tied to such personnel consequences as tenure, raises and termination.

Only teachers rated as effective or highly effective will be eligible for pay increases in the year after the evaluation. Marginal teachers will be given an opportunity to improve, while an unsatisfactory rating will be cause for termination.

Half of a teacher’s annual rating will still be based on student learning and growth, measured in part by standardized test scores, and the other half on teaching practices, rated in part through classroom observations.

For the school year that ended last month, the department said 81.8 percent of the 13,181 teachers evaluated under the EES were rated as effective, while 15.8 percent were rated highly effective. Less than 5 percent of teachers were marked marginal or unsatisfactory.

Under the revisions, student surveys — one of the most controversial parts of the Educator EffectivenessSystem, or EES — will no longer count as a percentage of a teacher’s evaluation rating, and highly rated teachers will be able to skip a year of being reviewed.

Deputy Superintendent Ronn Nozoe said the department used formal and informal feedback from teachers, principals and other experts to make improvements.

"We were really able to look at how could we focus in on the quality aspects of the Educator EffectivenessSystem and then reduce burdens to make sure that people have the time and space to really take the data and use it to improve," Nozoe said.

He added that the changes still "maintain the integrity of what we’re trying to do, which is create systems to help teachers be the best they can be."

Recent surveys have revealed widespread concerns over implementation of the EES, with principals saying the teacher evaluation system has negatively affected their schools and morale; teachers complaining they don’t understand how their performance rating is calculated; and both groups lamenting the time it requires to prepare for and perform the evaluations.

As part of teachers’ 2013-17 labor contract, the state and union agreed to the annual high-stakes evaluations, but the deal called for a joint committee of DOE and Hawaii State Teachers Association officials to review the design, validity, reliability and supports for the evaluations, and recommend changes to improve their design and implementation.

The joint committee made its recommendations to Matayoshi last week, resulting in some of the changes, which include:

» Reducing the number of required classroom observations from twice annually to zero for highly effective teachers and to one for effective teachers. Marginal, unsatisfactory and beginning teachers will still receive two or more annual observations. The department said overall this means about 9,000 fewer classroom observations, reducing the observation workload by almost 50 percent.

» Making the student survey annual instead of semiannual and eliminating the survey in second grade, first grade and kindergarten. Overall this means about 11,700 fewer survey administrations, or a 63 percent reduction.

» Requiring classroom teachers to set only one formal goal, or Student Learning Objective, at the start of the year to measure student progress, down from two. This translates to about 12,400 fewer required learning objectives, a task that makes up 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

HSTAPresident Wil Okabe called the changes a starting point to helping make the evaluations fair and equitable.

"It does cut down the workload, and I believe the superintendent through the joint committee really listened to the voices of the teachers. But there are still a lot of things that need to be worked out,"Okabe said. "The department has said this is a work in progress, and the teachers are at the table, so we are still going to work on improving this."

Several educators expressed some optimism about the changes, while others are still critical of using high-stakes evaluations.

Linell Dilwith, principal of Stevenson Middle School, said the changes "will make the work at the school level more manageable and ensure that we are focused on quality, not quantity."

Justin Hughey, a special-education teacher at King Kamehameha III Elementary on Maui, called the changes "a nice start"but added, "I wonder how many public school teachers this state lost due to the flawed rollout."

The modifications seem too superficial to some educators, like Campbell High School teacher Corey Rosenlee, who has led a charge to try to improve working conditions for teachers.

"The question is, Why are we doing evaluations? When surveyed, 70 percent of teachers said that EES did not improve their teaching," Rosenlee said. "None of the components of EES have changed. So instead of a bad system that wastes a lot of time, we have a bad system that wastes less time."

He added, "If we want to improve teaching, evaluations need to be collaborative, not evaluative. The goal needs to be to help teachers improve, not impose judgment. Otherwise teachers will be afraid to make mistakes. Instead they’re trying to show off to get high scores so they can get their pay increase."