A top Hawai'i education official is taking issue with a new national study released yesterday that says while U.S. high school students are taking tougher classes, and receiving better grades, they are apparently learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.

Robert Hillier, Hawai'i Department of Education coordinator for what's known as the Nation's Report Card testing, said while the results are somewhat perplexing, he wonders if students may actually be challenging themselves to a higher level than in the past and maybe that could be one reason for lower scores.

Indicators of that include the average number of credits earned by graduates: 23.6 in 1992 compared to 26.8 in 2005, said Hillier. In Hawai'i, a student is required to have 22 credits to graduate, including 18 in core areas.

"It seems like students are taking more courses," said Hillier. "Back in the 1990s, it was 'take what you need to and not much more.' "

Hillier also said participation in the 2005 test was fairly low — testing is voluntary for 12th-graders — and he thinks many of the best students chose not to take the test because they would have missed classroom work.

Despite Hillier's rosier view, national educators are saying the latest results of two reports issued yesterday by the federal Department of Education — assessing the performance of students in both public and private schools — offer discouraging implications for the state of education generally across the nation.

RESULTS 'STUNNING'

Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educational reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window-dressing.

"I think we're sleeping through a crisis," said David Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, during a Washington news conference convened by the Department of Education. He called the study results "stunning."

Nationally, the reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 U.S. schools, including 200 private schools. Only about 200 Hawai'i 12th-graders from just two public high schools participated in the 2005 testing.

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, said he found the results "dismal." After years of reforms aimed primarily at elementary schools, Fuller said the studies "certainly support shining the spotlight on the high school as a priority for reform efforts."

The reports summarized two major government efforts to measure the performance of high school seniors as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One was a standardized test of 12th-graders conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of the transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private.

The reports did not give separate results for public vs. private schools.

The transcript study showed that, compared to students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade-point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.

SCORES DROPPING

That was the good news — or so it seemed. But the standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.

Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the Department of Education switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn't directly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn't inspire confidence: Fewer than one-quarter of the 12th-graders tested scored in the "proficient" range.

The reports also showed that the gap separating white and black, and white and Hispanic students has barely budged since the early 1990s. And while the results were not broken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed that the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.

David Gordon, the Sacramento County, Calif., superintendent of schools and a participant in the Department of Education news conference, yesterday said he found it especially disturbing that the studies focused on "our best students," those who had made it to 12th grade or who had graduated.

"It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which effects not just some but most of our students," Gordon said.

Policy analysts nationwide said the studies were gloomy news for the American economy, since the country's educational system already measured poorly in international comparisons.

"What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the work force," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to improving education, especially for poor and minority students.

Among other things, Hall said, the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as "course inflation" — offering high-level courses that have "the right names" but a dumbed-down curriculum.

"What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past," she said. "So we are, in effect, lying to these students."

NO TIES TO 'NO CHILD'

Although the reports came out five years after passage of President Bush's signature education reform initiative, No Child Left Behind, Hall and others said it would be unfair to blame that program for the students' poor showing. They were already in high school when No Child Left Behind was enacted, and it is primarily aimed at elementary and middle schools.

Driscoll recalled an earlier president's contribution to education reform — the Nation at Risk report that seemed to galvanize the educational establishment when it was issued by President Reagan in 1983.

"That was a shocker," said Driscoll. "But here we are, 25 years later (and) ... we've just been ignoring what it's going to take to really change the system."

But Hawai'i's Hillier again had a conflicting opinion, saying he sees a hopeful rise in NAEP scores among fourth- and eighth-graders — both in Hawai'i and nationally. The 2007 testing is under way now in Hawai'i schools, with all Hawai'i public school fourth- and eighth-graders being tested and results expected in October on their reading and math scores.

"We have a nice pattern of improvement in grade 4 that has been going on for a while and in grade-8 math, we did have a trend of improvement until between 2003 and 2005, when it did flatten out," said Hillier.