Gov. Linda Lingle reviewed the Hawaii State Assessment issued to the state’s public school students, subsequently announcing she believes it is "too hard."

With this pronouncement, many public school teachers breathed a sigh of relief. Teachers at Kealakehe Intermediate and other Hawaii public schools say they don’t believe the assessment provides accurate evidence of student and school performance because the test is flawed. As a result, they say, schools, staff and students suffer from shame and humiliation when the results turn out less than stellar.

Is the assessment too hard or is the DOE paying $7 million per year for a test that asks the wrong questions?

A sample Hawaii State Assessment Parent Information Booklet for the 2005-2006 school year sent to parents of students scheduled to take the test this Spring, gives a glimpse of the real problem. The booklet includes several questions for grades 3 to10. Not only are the questions vague, but some of the answers provided are just plain wrong.

For example, a mathematics question for Grade 6 students, which requires a written-response, says:

"Lani wants to buy Kona coffee to send to her family on the mainland. The coffee is priced at $7 per pound including tax. If Lani can spend $100, what is the greatest number of pounds of coffee she can buy? Write your answer in your response booklet and show or explain how you found your answer."

The average sixth grader should easily be able to divide 100 by 7 and answer in less than 20 seconds that "14 bags of coffee with 2 dollars change". But that would not be the high scoring answer, according to the parent booklet. Instead, the student should also show how the answer was derived, subtracting 7 from 100 –14 times. Parents who were surprised by this answer and strategy their 11 and 12 year old children are supposed to employ say imagine the student trying to complete this task 40 times during a timed test.

The Content Standard and Benchmark measured by this question is the students’ "understanding of the meaning of operations and how they relate to each other" and to "describe situations when addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of integers, rationals and numbers involving whole number non-negative exponents are appropriate."

When asked why the DOE gives high scores to students who use primitive methods in lieu of established algorithms that took mankind several millennia to discover, a curriculum specialist in the DOE Office of Curriculum blamed Hawaii’s business leaders, saying "the business community imposed it on us."

The specialist claims the business community did not want workers who had only been taught through rote learning, because they can’t read the materials required at their jobs when they enter the working world.

Fuzzy Math and Whole Language

The DOE bureaucracy says teachers should allow students to invent their own methods when solving problems to truly understand the mathematical concept. This approach is confirmed by Superintendent Pat Hamamoto, who in her introduction of the DOE’s 2005-2008 Strategic Plan, states: "Rather than imparting knowledge, teachers now coach students to search, discover, evaluate and conclude."

The Superintendent, during a recent appearance on a local television news program, announced she is "waiting for students to discover that a circle is a circle and a ball is ball," instead of providing direct instruction. Parents ask if this is what has left Hawaii’s student performance at the bottom-of-the-barrel nationally.

The DOE’s philosophy can be traced to National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards and the belief that students can invent their own algorithms. Critics argue, however, that Archimedes, Euclid and Aristotle were not even clever enough to invent the addition algorithm.

The traditional addition algorithm is defined by memorizing a combination of 55 sums through a rote process that that provides the basis for real conceptual thinking.

Experts say that children must be given this locus of knowledge in order to learn sequentially and efficiently. The 4 stages in the learning process are defined as follows:

• Acquisition – The student learns to sound out a word or answer math problems correctly.
• Fluency -- The student writes a word without sounding out each letter and uses subtraction automatically when using long division.
• Maintenance – Instruction is designed to maintain a high level of performance of a time, i.e. practice makes perfect.
• Generalization – The student must perform a skill in different situations.

Hawaii’s teachers, however, are expected to involve their students in hands-on group learning (generalization) before they have achieved fluency. In doing so, curriculum experts say the entire learning process for the students is turned upside down.

Process Takes Precedence Over Results

The DOE further complicates the testing process by using a relativist approach to scoring. Students are allowed to use any process they devise to arrive at an answer. As seen in the above question, the highest score must include an explanation of the process the student used.

These open-ended questions may be scored between 0 to 4 points. A sixth

grade math test would contain 40 questions with 72 maximum points possible. In order to achieve "proficiency," the student must answer 70 percent or more of the questions correctly or at least 28 correct answers. The process then requires the student to score 70 percent out of the total possible points for those 28 questions.

The focus on process over results is not a DOE conspiracy to create more bureaucrats out of children who learn to think the same roundabout way.

Alarmingly, the Hawaii State Assessment questions were written by Harcourt, Inc. – a national developer of state assessment questions – with the help of Hawaii’s "team" of curriculum specialists, who worked with the contractor to create questions that "measure performance standards."

A national proliferation of fuzzy instruction coupled with a relativistic approach to assessment and scoring means that Hawaii isn’t unique in its high rates of illiteracy and math innumeracy.

A recently released study by the American Institutes for Research found that 20 percent of U.S. college students with bachelor’s degrees can not even calculate the cost of ordering office supplies or how much gas they need to get to the next gas station.

In 1997, California finally replaced its fuzzy math with sequential standards that enable students to access advanced level mathematics, while Hawaii’s students remain left behind adding sums on their fingers in hopes of achieving that "a-ha" moment.

When asked why the DOE continues to use methodologies that result in the majority of Hawaii’s children failing core subjects, while private and home school students thrive, the DOE Curriculum Specialist said, "Well, that’s why you have your children in private school."

References:

http://mathematicallycorrect.com/kprea.htm#G3

http://www.nychold.org/myths-050504.html

http://doe.k12.hi.us/standards/strategicplan.pdf

http://www.air.org/news/documents/Release200601pew.htm