The Hawaii Department of Education is changing the report cards for nine public schools, eight of them charter schools, because of either faulty or newly available data from Strive HI, the state’s new school performance and improvement system. 

The new system ranks schools in five categories based on a diverse set of a success measures whose standards are customized for each school region. The U.S. Department of Education approved Strive HI in May as a replacement for many No Child Left Behind requirements. 

The first results, which reflected data from the 2012-13 school year, were released last month.

Now, four of the schools in question now fall under different — better — categories than before. The rest of the schools are still in the same bracket that they were previously.

Results for five of the schools were adjusted because the department had mistakingly classified them based on just two years of graduation rate data when the system stipulates three years of data. Three of those schools were moved up one category from “Priority” — the second-to-worst ranking — to “Focus.” The two others are still considered “Priority.”

Meanwhile, three elementary charter schools provided data on chronic absenteeism — the percentage of students absent 10 or more days during the school year — that they had previously excluded in their reports. (Read more Civil Beat coverage of chronic absenteeism here.)

One school moved up a category — from “Focus” to “Continuous Improvement,” which is the second-to-best group — just by virtue of the other schools’ adjustments and changes to the number of schools included in lower classifications. 

Here’s a summary of the changes, according to the DOE:

Photo: Kalani High School’s 2013 graduation. Flaws in graduation rate data were one reason the results were adjusted, though not those for Kalani. (Courtesy of HIDOE.)

— Alia Wong