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In an effort to improve the state’s educational system, the Hawaii Department of Education is working to trade expensive management consultants for teams of specialists with specific knowledge of local schools.

But, with the new school year set to begin in early August, the district is still waiting on the data officials need to help them put in place the “Teams for School Improvement.”

“We’re chomping at the bit to get started,” said DOE Deputy Superintendent Ronn Nozoe.

Conclusions from that data won’t be available until July, he said.

Even then, Nozoe said, the upcoming school year is a “pre-implementation” phase, meaning that many consultant partnerships will stay intact just as they have in past years.

The DOE spent nearly $13 million this past school year on contracts with for-profit education consultants. Many state educators have long questioned whether students are getting the most of these costly arrangements, which have been commonplace in Hawaii since 2005.

Now the district wants to move away from such consultants, according to state officials and the department’s for partial exemption from the No Child Left Behind law that’s now widely seen as an outdated, one-size-fits-all approach to education reform.

But state education officials need data from the brand-new which measures student performance through factors such as state assessment scores, attendance and graduation rates. So they don’t know know how many teams are going to be created, who’s going to be on them and what schools are going to get them.

Nozoe said the teams reflect an overall effort to “realign” resources and create support networks within the department.

“The key to our success is internal capacity,” he said, emphasizing that the intention isn’t to completely phase out the consultants. “This is not an anti-consultant campaign.”

But the consultants’ success in improving education in Hawaii has been mixed and some say it’s time to try new strategies.

“The handwriting’s on the wall,” said Maui Waena Intermediate Principal Jamie Yap, who told Civil Beat in March that private consultants helped boost test scores at the school. Yap said it’s unclear how the state will end up using Title I money — federal funding earmarked for high-poverty schools — and whether commitments outlined in the application will take effect anytime soon.

In the past, many, if not most, schools with Title I status used that funding for the consultant contracts to satisfy No Child Left Behind requirements — an arrangement that caused much outrage among some teachers.

The No Child Left Behind act, a legacy of the George W. Bush presidency, was intended to help school districts improve their lowest-performing schools through federal funding that stipulates strict guidelines on education standards and student assessments.

A key component of the act involves rigorous student test performance benchmarks. If a school repeatedly fails to meet those benchmarks, it must take intense measures to bring students up to par.

One option is to contract with a private management company “with a demonstrated record of effectiveness to operate the school.”

Hawaii’s education department took that route for its underperforming schools, initiating partnerships with consultants such as , which gets the bulk of the state’s consultant money. Many of those contracts are still in effect to varying degrees.

But No Child Left Behind, which has garnered widespread criticism over the years for its emphasis on standardized testing, is gradually being squeezed out, with only 13 states still subject to all of its requirements.

Hawaii was among the from the act, with its September 2012 application approved in May. As of May, 45 states had applied for waivers from the Obama administration.

The so-called “flexibility” requests give states permission to disregard key parts of No Child Left Behind and instead implement their own school improvement plans. In its application, Hawaii’s education department cited Race to the Top — a competitive federal funding program through which — and its seven-year as alternatives to the Bush-era requirements.

The plan outlined in the waiver “is made here in Hawaii as opposed to in Congress,” said Hawaii Rep. Takashi Ohno, vice chairman of the House Education Committee. “We learned a lot of lessons from No Child Left Behind, but this will be better.”

Despite the consultants’ near-decade-long presence, Hawaii student performance has continued to trail behind the national average. More than half of the state’s 286 schools failed to meet federal benchmarks in the 2011-12 school year.

Though Hawaii’s waiver application hardly mentions private consultants, it does stress its plans to develop the in-house school improvement teams, which are meant to replace the consultants and facilitate the reform process starting this upcoming school year.

The “third-party” teams will include staff representing the education department and the 15 school regions, as well as specialists outside of the DOE who have expertise in specific areas, including parent involvement and English-as-a-second-language instruction. They’ll help coach teachers, build school-level capacity, identify intervention strategies and more.

In many instances, they may also help schools analyze data from student assessments, a task that some teachers say the private consultants have failed to do.

“The data is supposed to inform our instruction, but we weren’t getting any assistance,” said Logan Okita, a teacher who taught at Fern Elementary School, which partners with EdisonLearning, for seven years and is starting at Nimitz Elementary next year. Okita said she likes the idea of the new Teams for School Improvement because they will, in theory, consist of people who have a lot of experience in Hawaii’s schools.

Nozoe said the DOE hopes to transition to the new teams smoothly as schools learn what is effective.

“Sometimes they (the schools) need a little boost to get things moving,” Nozoe said, stressing that schools’ future relationship with consultants will be determined on a case-by-case basis drawing from upcoming data.

“It’s not like … you just buy stuff off the menu.”