Policy Update: Hawaii: Budget Blockage

Vital Statistics
1	Public school districts
249	Public schools
189,000	K-12 enrollment
76%	Minority students
15%	Children in poverty
8.5 %	Students with disabilities
$1.0 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

Much also depends on the direction that the new state superintendent, Paul G. LeMahieu, decides to take. The state school board appointed LeMahieu last summer to replace Herman Aizawa.

LeMahieu is a former executive director of the Delaware Education Research and Development Center at the University of Delaware in Newark. He is considered an authority on school reform and accountability, and served as a technical adviser to Quality Counts '98. LeMahieu is expected to make standards a more prominent piece of the state's education program.

While he supports the state's education officials and much of the work they have done, LeMahieu says he plans to challenge them to make standards more central to decisions made about curriculum, instruction, testing, and other aspects of education.

Statewide test results currently are published in an annual "report card," but LeMahieu has some different ideas about accountability. Instead of using one test to determine whether students graduate, for example, he would like the state to set up an understandable "accountability system" that covers the range of players involved in education.

Already, the state's Performance Standards Review Commission, as required by state law, has been collecting information from teachers and community members on how the standards are being used in the classroom. The commission's work was due to wrap up at the end of December.

"This will be the first time since the standards were created to really have a thorough critique and review," says Michael Heim, the education department's director of planning and evaluation.

One issue Heim hopes the commission will address is the sheer number of standards--more than 1,500 of them in eight subject areas. Testing students on all of them is virtually impossible, he says.

This school year, the state began using the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, instead of the previous edition, and changed the grade levels at which the tests will be given. Instead of testing in grades 3, 6, 8, and 10, the tests will be given in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9.

With that change, state officials also plan to move beyond just multiple-choice questions and begin asking students to provide some extended responses.

Heim notes that there is only "partial alignment" between the standards and assessments.

"If you were to go through our standards, one would find some for which plain vanilla multiple-choice items would be completely adequate," he says. "For others, that's not sufficient."

That's why the department has proposed using the New Standards exam, a commercial test that includes open-ended questions and is linked to a set of performance standards.

But LeMahieu says the assessment plan "looks and feels like too much of a patchwork." He points out that the New Standards test might not completely match Hawaii's content standards.

Heim is unsure when the de-partment might be able to start phasing in such a test, given the state's continuing economic woes. While most of the country has enjoyed an economic boom in recent years, Hawaii has suffered, mostly because of the Asian financial crisis and its effect on tourism. "Funding for anything that is an expansion item is really difficult," Heim says. The legislature appropriated $709 million in state funds for education last year, about $25 million short of what the department asked for.

"The single major issue is the budget, and it's been insufficient," says Greg Knudsen, the spokesman for the department.

With enrollment in the single, 189,000-student statewide system growing by about 1,000 students a year, money is needed to renovate existing schools and build new ones. The state's first multitrack, year-round school opened last fall, and more schools are expected to handle the growth with multitrack schedules in the future, Knudsen says.

The department is also under pressure to improve special education services by next year. A federal district court found in 1994 that children were being underidentified for services and that there was no coordinated system in the state for serving children with mental-health needs.

The education department and the state health department, which was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, are working to put extensive changes into effect.

One initiative, designed to expand the supply of special education teachers in the state, is under way at the University of Hawaii. The college of education there is offering two fast-track courses that will allow students to earn degrees in three to five semesters instead of five to eight.