Background
On December 31, 2021, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) offered states the opportunity to apply for short-term, one-year flexibilities with School Year (SY) 2021-22 ESEA accountability processing, school exits and identifications, and reporting via an addendum template. The Hawaii Department of Education (HIDOE) is planning to request some of these flexibilities to ensure it will meet the federal requirement to exit currently identified Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) and Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) schools, and to identify new CSI and TSI schools in Fall 2022. In addition, Hawaii will submit an amendment, which is the mechanism to request long-term revisions to its Consolidated State Plan. The waiving of administering statewide assessments is not a flexibility being offered by the ED.
Request for Public Comment on the Proposed Changes
This public comment process provides feedback to HIDOE for consideration in finalizing requests to the ED. The following table details the changes currently being considered for both the Addendum and Amendment.
| Submission | Request |
Addendum
| 1. Still to be determined if this will be requested. Currently under consideration: Replace/modify the chronic absenteeism measure with another measure for SY2021-22.
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| 2. Revision to the growth calculation methodology for when using 2021 growth results for multi-year calculations. Propose to calculate 2021 growth results based on 2021 and 2019 test results given no testing in 2020. |
| 3. Revision to add pre-COVID year(s) data used to identify schools across all exit and identification measures: Proficiency, growth (elementary/middle schools), graduation rate (high schools), chronic absenteeism, English Language Proficiency for English Learners. |
4. Consider the exclusion of some or all of the COVID impacted years, except 2022 which must be used for exits and identifications, and the option to weight multiple years differently with more weight attributed to results from pre-COVID year(s).
|
| Amendment | 1. Revision to the minimum number of students for which data shall be reported from 20 to 11. In 2021, the Hawaii State Legislature enacted HRS 302A-1004, requiring specific provisions on data reporting that includes reporting data when the number of students in a particular data subgroup is greater than ten. |
SY 2021-22 Accountability Addendum and AmendmentLinks for the following reference documents are provided below: (1) The COVID-19 Addendum Template, and (2) Hawaii's Consolidated State Plan.
HIDOE recommends the proposed addendum and amendment requests detailed in the table above with rationale for support summarized below:
- The use of 2021 and 2019 test results to calculate 2021 growth allows the use of 2021 growth data in lieu of what would otherwise be missing data given there were no 2020 growth results due to a waiver of statewide testing in 2020.
- The use of pre-COVID data for exiting CSI/TSI schools, and for identifying new schools, helps mitigate concerns with using only COVID impacted results.
- The option to more heavily weight pre-COVID years allows for further flexibility in diminishing the impact of COVID-year results in the identification and exiting of schools.
- Decreasing the minimum number of students for which results are reported allows ESEA determinations to account for more student subgroups previously excluded from calculations and ensures those results are more representative of schools' student populations.
