At Pu'ohala Elementary School, monthly assessments in reading and math indicate that students are making great strides in meeting the state's academic standards.

National tests provide further evidence of growth.

But the state's test tells a different story. "When the scores come out from the Hawai'i State Assessment, and it shows that we didn't make adequate yearly progress, morale hits a serious low," said Tracy Doane, the school's curriculum coordinator. "The system needs to be fixed, and needs to be fixed this year, not the next."

The Department of Education is already working on a "fix," by way of streamlined and better- targeted standards that should make it easier for teachers to make sure their students are meeting grade-level expectations.

While education officials say they do not want to relax their standards, they do want to find a way to help schools succeed. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools face tougher and more expensive sanctions each time they miss the targets set by the state.

Under NCLB, schools are expected to improve performance every year until 2014, when every student must be on grade level in core subjects.

But the most recent statewide test results of third-, fifth-, eighth- and 10th-graders show that only 42 percent to 56 percent of students are on or above grade level in reading, and 20 percent to 28 percent meet or exceed proficiency in math.

Board of Education member Karen Knudsen said the goal is to find targets that are "appropriate and rigorous."

"When we developed the standards, we had broad community input," she said. "We wanted high, excellent standards, never anticipating that they would be turned around and used against us."

While some states have deliberately set low standards to avoid federal penalties, Hawai'i created standards that are more rigorous than most.

In May, the journal Education Next ranked Hawai'i's as the sixth-most-demanding in the nation and pointed out "the states with the highest expectations often stand accused of having the schools most in need of improvement — even when their students are doing relatively well."

Hawai'i has 24 schools facing the toughest level of sanctions under NCLB, and many more are forced to offer transfers, tutoring and other services to help boost student performance.

The new set of standards that will go into effect in the 2006-07 school year retains most of the expectations from the previous two versions of the Hawai'i Content and Performance Standards, but organizes them in a way the DOE expects will be more manageable for teachers.

The standards have been reduced to only the essential skills, but in math, for instance, there was not a lot of omission.

However, the set of benchmarks for each grade level has been cut in half, leaving 20 to 30 targets that students must reach each year. "With the large number of indicators (in the present standards), it looked like an unrealistic goal to accommodate all the indicators," said Wesley Yuu, a DOE education specialist in mathematics.

One of the big differences is that the new standards will be grade-level specific rather than set for grade clusters, as they are now.

That should stop students from being surprised to find themselves tested on things they learned — or will learn — in a different grade.

And a complex series of "performance indicators" is being simplified to one sample assessment that teachers can use to determine whether a student has mastered a standard.

Math standards also have been limited to pre-algebra and algebra, which is in line with the DOE's plan to make pre-algebra the lowest-level math class in the high schools, so all students will be expected to take algebra by their sophomore year.

Doane, at Pu'ohala, said she has been pleased with what she has seen of the new standards. "They're much more streamlined, and they're clearer to the teachers, and they're more reader-friendly and user-friendly," she said.

She said she hopes that when the new test is created for spring 2007, it has similar improvements. Right now, "The test is a tricky test. It doesn't ask really straightforward questions," she said. "It's demoralizing."