Hawai'i schools receive mixed grades
By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer
Hawai'i public schools yesterday received a D+ on a national education report card for their new, vaunted standards and accountability movement — a grade school officials dispute at the same time they acknowledge the relative infancy of their program.
In the seventh annual "Quality Counts" report, Education Week magazine ranked Hawai'i's standards and accountability system ninth-lowest of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
It was a slight improvement over last year's sixth-lowest ranking and D- grade for standards and accountability. The report looked at whether the states had clear, content-based standards and a testing program to measure student performance. The first Hawai'i-designed standardized test was given to students in April. Some states have had such tests for years.
Overall, Hawai'i's report card results landed the state in the middle to lower half of the nation's schools on a range of measures, about the same as last year.
The public schools fared best on school equity, receiving the only A in the nation. Hawai'i has the nation's only single-district school system — a design that makes the bureaucracy large, but is credited with keeping the financing of rural, poor or Neighbor Island schools on par with that of Honolulu campuses.
"I really do feel that that's a well-deserved A," said Department of Education spokesman Greg Knudsen. "It's a strength of the system that we shouldn't lose sight of."
The "Quality Counts" report focused this year on teacher qualifications, finding a dearth of well-qualified teachers nationally in schools with high levels of student poverty or minority students.
The Hawai'i numbers indicate that the experience level of teachers is not that different at high-poverty and low-poverty schools. Nearly all Hawai'i campuses would qualify as high minority.
Karen Ginoza, president of the Hawai'i State Teachers Association, said an advantage of having a statewide school district is that teacher experience and qualifications do not vary as much here, while some suburban and inner city districts on the Mainland have wide differences.
Hawai'i's grade for adequacy of resources has risen over the years to a B-. When the "Quality Counts" report started seven years ago, the state received a D-. Knudsen said improvements in the special education system and in teachers' pay have helped improve that score.
Hawai'i lags in teachers' pay. The report adjusted the salaries for cost-of-living, which gave Hawai'i the second-lowest starting teachers' salary in the nation and the lowest average teachers' salary in the nation, at $22,261 and $30,899, respectively.
Starting teachers at the DOE actually earn $33,295, while the most experienced teachers can earn $62,333 per year.
Hawai'i scored a C- on school climate, with 93 percent of fourth-graders and 88 percent of eighth-graders reporting that they feel safe in school. But for the second year, 45 percent of the state's eighth-graders attend schools where officials say fighting is a problem.
Hawai'i spent an average of $6,794 per student in 2002, compared with a national average of $7,524.
Education Week's complete "Quality Counts 2003" report can be found at www.edweek.org/sreports/qc03.
