The federal government recently rejected a state request to grade Hawai'i public school students on how much their test scores improve each year — not on the actual scores.

The rejection is a blow to Hawai'i efforts to ease pressure on public schools to reach federally mandated benchmarks.

Hawai'i wanted to join seven states that are now evaluated under the so-called "growth model," which measures how much progress individual students make, rather than whether they hit arbitrary score levels in the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Officials pushed for change with the hope that fewer Hawai'i schools would face federal sanctions for underperforming. Sanctions can range from allowing students to transfer to better-performing schools to the removal and replacement of school staff.

Over the past two years, just 34 percent of the state's public schools made their NCLB goals, with the remainder facing some form of sanction. There are 50 Hawai'i schools — 17.7 percent — facing the most severe sanction, which entails full-scale restructuring and intervention by outside agencies.

Board of Education member Denise Matsumoto yesterday called the rejection of Hawai'i's bid simply more evidence of how "inconsistent" the federal government has been.

"They'll allow waivers for some states and not for others," Matsumoto said. "It's happened all over the country — and it's not because our plan is bad."

To date, seven states have received full or conditional approval to use a growth model to measure progress: North Carolina, Tennessee, Delaware, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and Ohio. The U.S. Department of Education says it will eventually allow up to 10 states to use the growth model.

In addition to Hawai'i, six other states are vying for approval: Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Utah.

Matsumoto said the growth model "is a way for NCLB to be fairer — especially to special populations of students."

"Not all students learn at the same pace," she said. "But the whole idea is to show they are making consistent progress and a growth model would do that."

A LOOK AT THE SCORES

The news comes as the Board of Education expects to get its first look tomorrow at the latest overall Hawai'i State Assessment scores of students from third through 10th grades (excluding ninth grade), as well as rankings of how each school fared in meeting federal goals for the 2006-07 school year.

The board and the public won't see final tallies of how students fared in testing this year until August, when the DOE releases a comprehensive review of every school's achievement — and what that means in terms of potential restructuring at individual schools.

To achieve the minimum federal benchmarks, the state's 282 public schools must demonstrate that 28 percent of students meet math standards and 44 percent meet reading standards this year.

Those levels will increase again next year when 46 percent of a school's students need to be proficient in math and 58 percent proficient in reading.

LAW UP FOR RENEWAL

Under federal law, public schools must show that 100 percent of their students are proficient in core subject areas by 2014, but states have been allowed to establish their own levels to achieve that goal.

The federal law is up for renewal this year and is still being debated in Congress. States are hoping to see some changes, including more tilting toward a growth model overall. Congress is not expected to vote on a new law until September.

Robert McClelland, who heads the Department of Education's Systems Accountability Office, said the DOE plans to do an internal evaluation of the schools using a growth model anyway — to see how schools would have been affected by the alternative evaluation system.

McClelland said Hawai'i's request had two major deficiencies, according to the federal analysis: