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Hawaii is trying to raise its educational standards by giving students the option to choose tougher graduation requirements.

But national education analysts say that, despite the efforts of education leaders, there is no way to know today whether the will meet its goal of giving Hawaii’s graduates an edge in an increasingly global economy.

This year’s is the first class to graduate eligible for the Board of Education Recognition Diploma, which has slightly more demanding requirements than the standard high school diploma. Thirty-three percent of students are in the program.

But the real focus is on freshmen who began school last September, the Class of 2013. Of that group, 17 percent signed up for the program this year. They’re going for an even more rigorous diploma.

Yet, the state’s standard credit requirements for graduation are already competitive with those of other states — although Hawaii’s student achievement rates continue to straggle in the back of the pack.

The new diploma is the first effort by the Hawaii State Board of Education to establish a separate course of study for students to opt into. It comes at a time when at least three states — , and Tennessee — are moving away from differentiated diploma offerings to a single standardized high school curriculum.

Hawaii’s new diploma doesn’t look remarkable at first glance. Even its next, more rigorous phase, requires only one more credit than the current standard diploma’s 24 credits. And only one more credit than required to graduate in or , other states with poor academic results.

The diploma is not all about number of credits though, said Daniel Hamada, assistant superintendent of curriculum for the education department. The recognition diploma for the class of 2013 amps up the rigor of the normal standards with more specific course requirements in science and English, one additional math credit requirement and an end-of-course exam for Algebra II. The greatest benefit to the board’s recognition diploma, though, is its requirement for a senior project, Hamada said. The project is designed to help students culminate their 12 years of education and show them how it applies to the real world. High school seniors are paired with an adviser — usually someone from the business community, Hamada said — who can walk them through the process.

High schools nationwide have been implementing senior project programs since 1987, said Gerry Madrazo, an administrator for school renewal in the education department.

“Hawaii has carefully watched the development of the senior project, considered (some) schools in Hawaii that have had the programs for years, read and reviewed national research, observed and reviewed other states’ mandates, studied work force statistics, college studies on entry level students and held many professional discussions within the department,” Madrazo said. The conclusion was that the senior projects would benefit the students by giving them the freedom to learn dynamically instead of in a one-size-fits-all course.

Building Skills For 21st Century Jobs

What’s key, he said, is skills development geared toward 21st Century jobs. “Real learning is not static for the school nor the student,” he said. “It is about growth, experience and success. All of those characteristics take time. There are no short cuts.”

released in January 2008 by the outlines some of the new diploma’s benefits for students:

• Their high school education aligns with the expectations of employers and colleges;

• They will be eligible for a State of Hawaii B Plus Scholarship at the University of Hawaii if they earn the Diploma with Honors (minimum 3.0 grade point average) and demonstrate financial need;

• Their diploma aligns with criteria for federal Academic Competitiveness Grants of $750 in the first year of college and $1,300 in the second year of college for low-income (Pell eligible) students;16 and,

• They have a foundation in Science,Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), although students interested in pursuing STEM-intensive fields should take advanced science and mathematics courses beyond those required by the proposed Recognition Diploma.

As promising as those things sound, though, there is no hard data showing whether the two or three voluntary requirements the department to the recognition diploma will help get students into and through college, said Jennifer Dounay Zinth, senior policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States in Denver. A reading of academic literature on the topic supports her view.

Although shows substantially more rigorous courses can increase high school students’ likelihood of finishing college, she said there are also examples of similar attempts to increase academic rigor, such as in Chicago, producing “dismal results.”

The diploma’s success quotient, Zinth said, really depends on whether the students receiving it get degrees four years later, and at a higher rate than students with the regular diploma.

“Getting more students to finish college and getting students to complete a degree is where the rubber really hits the road,” she said.

The first students to graduate with the highest-level recognition diploma won’t finish high school until 2013, so the first indication of its impact won’t come until 2017.

Approximately 76 percent of Hawaii’s high schoolers graduate with the current regular diploma (take a look at our topic page on Hawaii Student Achievement for more background on graduation requirements, rates and post-secondary plans), and around 33 percent participated in the recognition diploma pre-Class of 2013. Forty percent of Hawaii’s high school graduates enter college and only 12 percent complete college on time, according to a from Step Up Hawaii, a Hawaii P-20 campaign to motivate students to register for the recognition diploma.

So far, 2,200 ninth-graders from 45 public schools — or roughly 17 percent of the ninth-graders — have committed this year to pursuing the advanced diploma for 2013.

More Data Needed To Measure Success

Predicting the new curriculum’s success is difficult for several reasons, Zinth said, including:

• the new voluntary requirements don’t differ dramatically from Hawaii’s standard curriculum.
• nobody knows yet how many students will choose to pursue the advanced diploma.
• a high number of required credits does not necessarily mean those credits will represent high-quality courses.

“It’s hard to say how many students are going to opt into these different requirements,” Zinth said. “People always assume that when you make the requirements harder, fewer students will opt in, but that is not the case in Indiana.”

High numbers of low-income and minority students are enrolling in Indiana’s new college-ready and career technology diploma tracks, she explained. Collecting such data would be a key way to gauge the new diploma’s success.

If a lot of students do choose to pursue Hawaii’s recognition diploma, Zinth said, it could place a significant strain on the faculty and facilities to offer enough of the advanced math and English courses students that students will be required to take. The Chicago experiment failed in part due to lack of teacher preparation, she said. Any new academic requirements will be limited in their positive impact on students, she said, if teachers are not prepared to meet their students’ growing needs as they pursue ever-tougher courses of study.

Simply increasing the number of credits required for graduation hasn’t necessarily been a predictor of greater success, she concluded. Some states that appear to have relatively weak requirements can have high numbers of high school graduates earning college degrees. Delivery of the new voluntary requirements and data tracking of the students who take them are key.

The department is already beginning to collect data on the diploma’s results for the 2010 graduating class, Madrazo said.