Hawaii

Hawaii Affiliate

Through the support and leadership of the Hawaii Business Roundtable and Hawaii Department of Education and with the support of the Hawaii P-20 Initiative, Just for the Kids-Hawaii is driving school improvement across the state. Leadership and funding from the Castle Foundation is helping to make this a reality.

Contact:
Carl Takamura
Executive Director, Hawaii Business Roundtable

For additional information on becoming a Just for the Kids state affiliate, click here.

2004 Hawaii Elementary School Identification Criteria

Grades Included: 3rd and 5th Grade
Subjects Included: Mathematics and Reading
Years Included: 2002, 2003, and 2004

The table below details the three areas of identification process issues:

  1. Data Components – the types of information preferred in the analysis;
  2. Model Specifications – the ways that schools are compared to one another, and;
  3. Criteria – the specific goals schools must meet to be considered high-performing.

Performance Rate Used: % Proficient or above

Data Components NCEA Model Hawaii
Longitudinal Data If longitudinal data are available, the analysis only evaluates students who were continuously enrolled on the campus for three or more years.1 No longitudinal data was available, so snapshot data was used and all tested students were analyzed.
Consistent Performance To ensure that consistently high-performing schools are identified, three years of performance data are used. NCEA model applied.
Criterion Referenced Exams Criterion-Referenced Tests (CRTs) are strongly preferred to Norm-Referenced Tests (NRTs). NCEA model applied.

Model Specifications NCEA Model Hawaii
Similar Schools For each tested grade and subject, and within each of the prior performance groups, schools are compared to one another based on a combination of demographic factors that include the schoolwide percentages of low income students, the school enrollment, the percent of students in the prior performance group being analyzed, and several schoolwide ethnicity percentages.2 The comparisons are weighted by the number of continuously enrolled tested students on each exam. A school's relative performance is the distance between their performance rate and the average performance rate of schools similar to them. The model used the following demographic factors to compare schools for each year, within each subject and grade: schoolwide percentages of low income, English Language Learners (ELL), Hispanic, African-American, and Asian students, the school enrollment, and the grade level percent of students tested in the subject. Without longitudinal data, the number of all (not just continuously enrolled) students tested in the subject was used to weight the analysis by size.3
Rank Groups After calculating a campus' relative performance (on a particular tested subject and grade), it is ranked within one of ten low income groups: those with 0-10% low income students on the campus, 10-20% low income students, 20-30% low income students, etc. The rank produced is called an individual performance rank. Because there are few elementary schools in Hawaii, these groups were combined into two rank groups: 0-50% low income students, and 50-100% low income students.

Criteria NCEA Model
Individual Performance Rank Each individual performance rank represents one tested grade, subject and year where there were 10 or more continuously enrolled students. Each of these ranks must be at the 50th percentile or above (in the top half). Because of difficulties finding consistency, this criterion was relaxed in Hawaii from 50 or above to 40 or above.
Overall Performance Rank The overall performance rank - which is an average of all the individual performance ranks across one tested subject - must be among the top of similar schools. The actual required rank - which depends on how many tested grades are at the school - ranges between 70 and 85.4 NCEA model applied - overall performance ranks had to be 75 or above.
Participation Rates and AYP Status In years and subjects where Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) ratings are available, the school must meet AYP standards. In years or subjects (i.e. Writing) where AYP data are not available, at least 85% of the enrolled students had to be tested on their state's standardized exam. AYP data were available and used for years 2003 and 2004 of the analysis, and participation rates were used for 2002.
Number of Students There must be at least 10 continuously enrolled students in one of the two prior performance groups for each grade, subject, and year in the analysis. There were no longitudinal data available, so the number of tested students was substituted.

1 If a school did not have three years of continuous enrollment due to their grade span configuration, three years of continuous district enrollment was substituted.  back
2 These factors may vary from state to state and based on the available data.   back
3 The percent of students tested was not available in 2004, so a calculation was made of the number tested (collected in the spring) divided by the number in the grade (collected in the fall). A small percentage of the time this percent was significantly over 100. Percent tested data was available in 2003.   back
4 These overall performance ranks can differ because of the various grades and subjects tested in different states - in a state where 3rd - 6th grade are tested, a K-3 campus will have only one grade with which to identify high performance, while a K-5 has three grades. Our research indicated that in such states it was considerably easier for the K-3 to appear high-performing, so we scaled the required overall performance rank based on the number of grades and subjects involved in the analysis.   back