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241 241 CONCLUSION The Ongoing Need to Restore Indigenous Vessels As I was nearing the completion of my manuscript, sitting at my kitchen table and typing away one afternoon in the late spring of 2011, the familiar chime of my text message notification sounded. It was HKM’s po‘o kumu, Mahinapoepoe Duarte: “Ua lanakila. We passed our math HSA test!!!” Mahina had come on board that fall and led a relentless campaign to improve students’ math scores on the Hawai‘i State Assessment (HSA), as math had been the subject keeping HKM from meeting AYP targets. Absolutely determined to get the school out of NCLB restructuring status, the faculty, administration, and families together supported Saturday math tutoring, before- and after-school math enrichment , monthly pizza parties for the groups or students who spent the most time on their computer-based supplemental math program, and weekend-long intensive math camps, in addition to regular daily math instruction. Kumu Mahina made it a point to inform teachers, board members, students, and their families at every possible opportunity about the targets that needed to be met—how many students needed to pass in order to make safe harbor or to fully meet Adequate Yearly Progress targets. I texted Mahina back,“Hulō! Hulō! Mahalo nui for all your dedication and commitment to this goal. It’s a huge day for HKM! Send my congratulations to all,and hug all the‘ōpio for me!” Under the state’s new testing protocols, students were allowed to take the computer-based Hawai‘i State Assessment three times during a set window of time. As long as each student met the target score on one of these three attempts, they could be counted toward the school meeting AYP. With each administration the anticipation on campus built, and students’scores climbed. On the day of the final administration of the test, I had been observing hula classes. Even at a distance from the classrooms designated for the tests, the anxiety and excitement was palpable. Emotions were running high. CONCLUSION 242 242 Several folks I had spoken with during the testing days told me that students who had previously said,“Screw this test!” were trying their best and using the full amount of test time allotted. Most of the‘ōpio expressed a desire to score well for themselves and for their school. As I watched from afar several exited the doors of the testing room final score in hand, jumping for joy, greeted by supportive teachers and peers waiting outside. Over the course of the next day, I got more emails and phone calls from other members of the school community—teachers and board members—who were as jubilant as Kumu Mahina. Enough students had exceeded state targets on the test for the school not only to make safe harbor by showing incremental gains in comparison to the previous year but to exceed the math AYP goals outright! I shared their elation. For the first time in five years, the school was surpassing the state’s math score targets. More important, students were making tremendous math gains,with many‘ōpio improving by two or more grade levels over the course of the year. There was collective relief that the school would survive another year under NCLB. (As this book went to press the preliminary results of the 2012 Hawai‘i State Assessment were released, and Hālau Kū Māna was one of only two high schools on O‘ahu to be “in good standing, unconditional” under the stipulations of NCLB.) I took a breath, exhaling before turning back to my computer and continuing to write. The sense of shared jubilation provoked a sudden flashback to the moment Keola and I celebrated the granting of HKM’s charter as we stood in front of the state’s board of education ten years earlier. The memory tempered my initial joy about the test results.“So according to the settler state’s definitions, our students and school are adequate,” I thought. I opened the transcripts from my interview with math and science teacher Trevor Atkins, whom I had spoken with a few months earlier. He had told me about the tensions he and other math teachers felt between trying to implement project-based math curriculum (such as the curriculum he had designed on sustainable kalo production) and trying to“respond to the pressure from the state and federal governments” to meet AYP targets and the state’s “very textbook math standards...

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