Standardized testing is in full swing in Hawaii’s public schools, with about 93,000 students in grades 3-8 and 11 taking new, more difficult exams aligned with Common Core academic standards. Unlike in some U.S. school districts, public schools here report no major technical difficulties administering the online tests and see few students avoiding the assessments, according to state Department of Education leaders.

Hawaii’s unique single, statewide school district helps explain why there generally has been less opposition here to the Common Core, and to the standardized tests given to tell whether students have mastered the standards, than elsewhere.

Notable "opt-out" movements arose in New Jersey, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, for example, amid an outcry against high-stakes testing in general and federal mandates in particular. By contrast, Hawaii public-school parents and students are used to statewide requirements that may be resented as intrusions in mainland school districts used to wielding authority at the local level.

Also, Hawaii has had state-level educational standards for decades, and therefore has given standardized tests statewide to assess whether children were meeting them. Hawaii adopted the Common Core standards as an outgrowth of those earlier benchmarks. It is one of about 30 states to embrace the national learning goals that describe what students should know and be able to do at each grade level to ultimately graduate from high school prepared for college and careers.

As for technological issues, voluntary practice tests given last year and earlier this year at dozens of schools helped iron out glitches before the statewide rollout of the Smarter Balanced Assessment in English language arts and math, state superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi and other members of the DOE’s leadership team told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser editorial board earlier this month.

Overall, testing "is going well and that is due to the hard work of the students and everyone else in our schools," Matayoshi said.

For most schools, the testing window opened March 10 and closes June 3; it closes June 25 for multitrack campuses. The assessments include a series of online and hands-on tasks that measure students’ skills in reading, math, writing, listening, research and critical thinking.

Hawaii teachers largely support the uniform guideposts embodied in the Common Core, but decry a one-size-fits approach to teaching aligned curricula and the emphasis on high-stakes tests to gauge whether students are meeting the goals, said Joan Lewis, vice president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the labor union that represents 12,500 public-school teachers. Matayoshi’s team acknowledged that input and are working on improvements.

"On the whole, I think teachers are very supportive of the Common Core, and I think the HSTA is. They’ve got Common Core training and workshops and professional development opportunities so we have a good partner, I think, with the union," said Assistant Superintendent Stephen Schatz, who oversees the DOE’s Office of Strategy, Innovation and Performance, which includes the assessment and accountability branch.

"The question of whether or not we’re testing too much is coming up a lot, so one of things that we’ve started over the past six months is … a review of our assessment portfolio," he said. "We’re in the midst of this conversation with our educators and our leaders to say, how do we get the right information for the right purposes? How do we make sure that we are spending the most amount of time possible instructing our kids?"

Hawaii’s DOE is ahead of the national curve in using multiple measures to rate school performance, having received a waiver from the federal government in 2013 to use its Strive HI index as a better gauge of how well schools serve students of diverse socioeconomic, racial and cultural backgrounds. Strive HI, which supplanted the No Child Left Behind law’s Adequate Yearly Progress formula, considers absenteeism, graduation, college-going and remediation rates among several factors — including test scores — as factors in overall school performance.

Now, as hopes rise that an overdue reauthorization of NCLB (technically the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA) could make it through Congress, the expectation is that annual testing requirements will be less prescribed and that states can do more to further their own aims — if a bipartisan Senate draft of the legislation prevails. 

Hawaii is well positioned to take full advantage of that flexibility, should it be forthcoming. For example, the state could lower the number of standardized tests required of high-schoolers by seeking to substitute the ACT college and career-readiness exam for the Smarter Balanced Assessment as proof of mastery of the Common Core standards in grade 11. The DOE administers the ACT annually to students in grades 9, 10 and 11, which serves students well. Those already intending to go to college receive free, valuable practice on a key entrance exam, while some students not aspiring to higher education do better than they expect and realize they can succeed in college. If the feds become more flexible, reaching that benchmark could signal attainment of the Common Core standards.

"Absolutely none of this is decided, but these are the kinds of things we are thinking about" as ESEA revisions advance, "all with the intention that testing always supports learning," said Schatz.

Even Hawaii principals who are highly critical of the DOE’s top-down initiatives and state-level leadership like the Common Core, although they consider the rollout of curriculum and assessments supporting the new standards was deeply flawed, according to a survey by the Education Institute of Hawaii, a nonprofit advocating for greater school-level empowerment.

The survey, conducted in February and March among roughly 250 public-school principals, found that 70 percent of the 144 principals who responded believed that Common Core standards are good for their students. But only 18 percent said that DOE leadership had done a good job implementing the standards and a mere 8 percent said that was true when it came to implementing the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Eighty-six percent agreed that DOE leadership places too much emphasis on standardized test scores, which factor into teachers’ evaluations and pay.

"Nobody objects to having a common set of standards. The difficulty is in the implementation of the Common Core curriculum and the punitive nature of the testing," said Roberta Mayor, EIH board president. "The objections get to the whole nature of testing. You really want it to be of assistance to the individual student, but this is more about comparative rankings of schools."

Results from this spring’s tests will be available in August, to be used as a barometer of student progress and one factor among several in future teacher and school evaluations. The DOE has already warned parents that it expects students’ overall scores to decline significantly compared to the Hawaii State Assessments in reading and math, which the Smarter Balanced exams are replacing. That is because the new academic standards are more challenging, so the tests aligned with them are tougher too; other Common Core states issued similar advice. The DOE will treat the scores as a new baseline for students.

However, many students will be achieving more, even if proficiency scores drop from the former benchmarks, Matayoshi predicted.

"I think that one thing that is a little hard for people to understand is that even if there’s a drop in the number of students proficient, the level of proficiency is higher," she said. "I know this is not a perfect analogy, but say you are doing a high jump, and 60 percent of the kids can jump over 4 feet. Then you raise the bar to 5 feet. Fewer kids will get over that higher bar, but they are still jumping higher than they were before."