With the new year barely under way, Hawai'i public school teachers and students already are looking toward April and the next round of grueling high-stakes testing under No Child Left Behind.

But there are changes in the Hawai'i State Assessment this year — and students can expect to see fewer questions, a shorter time frame of testing and questions more closely aligned with the material they've been covering.

At the same time, teachers have been raising concerns about the increased number of tests the department has mandated this year — including quarterly assessments of students at every school, not just those in restructuring — and the additional time being taken away from instruction to score and evaluate those tests.

"We're just testing, testing, testing when we should be teaching, teaching, teaching," said Roger Takabayashi, president of the Hawai'i State Teachers Association, the union that serves Hawai'i's 13,200 public school teachers.

"It's like the farmer trying to weigh his animals daily expecting growth and not having time to feed them."

Those concerns also have come to the Board of Education, and members are asking for more information about how the increased testing is working — and whether changes to the Hawai'i State Assessment, slated for April 9 to 13, are a move in the right direction.

"Maybe a shorter test wasn't a good choice," board member Maggie Cox said this week. She was speaking at a committee meeting examining the latest changes to the HSA come April, when students across the state sit down in their classrooms to prove what they've learned.

Along with evaluating the new testing schedule, the BOE wants to make sure the state is getting its money's worth from the three contracts that create tests for the state.

These include a three-plus year $27 million contract with American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, a $1.3 million one-year contract with Harcourt and a one-year $75,000 contract with Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.

The testing will determine which Hawai'i schools reach Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act that carries sanctions for failing schools. To date, 50 Hawai'i public schools are in restructuring and about 66 percent have failed to meet standards for the past two years.

The results carry ramifications for every public school — determining whether they'll move in or out of sanctions — or perhaps become eligible for national Blue Ribbon School status. Sanctions under No Child Left Behind can mean a takeover by the state, and the use of federal funds to bolster scores according to a plan that schools aren't in charge of.

Hawai'i's poor showing also continues to be a black eye for the state's public school system. Despite gains made at many schools, often those gains aren't meeting the standard set by the federal government.

But state education officials expect the new mandate for more testing to help schools and teachers better focus on and fix gaps in every child's learning.

MEANT TO HELP LEARNING

"The intent is really to help students learn and demonstrate their attainment and show their strengths and weaknesses," said Patricia Ishimaru, test development specialist for the Department of Education.

In looking at the department's increased demands this year for quarterly tests — conducted this school year in October and December — teachers also have expressed concerns that benchmarks are tested out of order to the way they're taught. And that can mean a shuffling of school academic plans.

"I know of one school that gives the (quarterly) tests and just shelves the scores and information," said June Motokawa, student services coordinator at Kawananakoa Intermediate, which had appealed the state testing mandate and lost.

"The major impact is time — time to correct, time to profile the scores and time to relook in the next quarter and beef up what should have been taught," Motokawa said. "That's one of the big questions. If I have to redo the first-quarter curriculum for math, then how do I get to second-quarter material? And then by third quarter I'll be even further behind."

Motokawa said she doesn't blame the state for trying this technique to better familiarize students with the HSA format and boost scores, but it has meant stressing teachers with the extra work load, including finding time to correct the written responses. And since the school is already meeting Adequate Yearly Progress, she wishes they could have had an extra year to prepare for the additional load.

"Our Wednesday faculty meeting time was spent with 50 people correcting the written parts of tests in an assembly line," Motokawa said. "The teachers try to correct the multiple responses between classes."

SACRIFICING POSITIONS

In anticipation of these new needs, Motokawa said Kawananakoa chose to create a new position to coordinate the testing but had to give up an outreach counselor and security officer. One result: a vice principal directs traffic each morning to make up for part of the loss.

At Kapolei Middle School, principal Annette Nishikawa has tried creative strategies to handle the extra load, using some of the extra funding her large multitrack school received under the Weighted Student Formula to create seven new positions: five department chairpeople who coordinate and score part of the tests and two counselors whose job in part entails creating incentives for students to help boost scores.

'WE'RE DROWNING'

Even so, she told board members during the bimonthly meeting this week, "We're drowning."

Everyone in the school is being asked to help correct tests, she said, even with the extra positions.

Nonetheless, Nishikawa said she believes these additional assessments are helping teachers refocus learning that hasn't taken hold.

The school's unique incentive program to reward students who perform well on the HSA is making an impression on students.

All those who met the standards last year received special T-shirts emblazoned with a victory slogan and on Fridays those students who wear the shirts earn special activities at school, everything from an afternoon at the movies to front-row seats for a taiko drum performance at school.

Students say the rewards for doing well are welcome.

"I felt proud I was one of those who met the standards during HSA," said 11-year-old sixth-grader Raymond Pedrina. "I'm going to try to work even harder so I can exceed this time."

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com.