Hawai'i's academic standards are among the highest in the nation and until now the school system has defended its high expectations, even as more and more schools faced sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Last night, however, board member Karen Knudsen said Hawai'i's math test, in particular, is demoralizing to students.

"It just doesn't make sense to me. Why are we doing this to our kids?" she said during a BOE meeting on Maui. "I like academic rigor. But this is cruel, in my opinion."

Schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto said the standards will be revisited this year and will likely be refined to "realistic" levels.

State Department of Education spokesman Greg Knudsen said the Hawai'i Content and Performance standards are already being revised, and once the new set is approved by the BOE, the department can take a fresh look at the Hawai'i State Assessment and change the way it is scored.

"It's not an effort to redefine proficiency or dumb down the curriculum ... but at the same time it has been acknowledged that Hawai'i's standards are among the highest in the nation," Greg Knudsen said.

"We intentionally set it high in the beginning, before we knew it was going to be put into the context of No Child Left Behind," he said. "We didn't know it was going to be linked to all this scrutiny and punishment."

Under NCLB, states must demonstrate progress every year until 2014, when every child in the nation is expected to be on grade level in core subjects. The individual states define their proficiency levels.

Not only does Hawai'i have more rigorous standards than most other states, but it is also ahead of the curve in imposing NCLB sanctions on underperforming schools. After missing the targets for at least six years, 24 schools are facing the toughest sanctions under the federal law, with management handed over to private providers or the state DOE.

One way the assessments could change is to bring them more in line with the Stanford Achievement Test, a national test that shows how Hawai'i students compare to their peers across the nation. Hawai'i students have consistently scored better on the SAT — a multiple choice test — than on the Hawai'i State Assessment, which includes both multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

"By the national standard, Grades 3 and 5 are doing quite well — but when you look at the HSA, you wonder why they aren't doing as well on that measure," Greg Knudsen said. "Something is clearly out of sync."

Board member Herbert Watanabe urged administrators to identify successful programs at individual schools and require others to emulate those programs as a way of helping to improve achievement.