The state Department of Education said it will do more research before deciding whether to seek a waiver to key provisions of the once-heralded No Child Left Behind law, which requires that schools meet rising annual proficiency goals or risk losing federal money.

States will be allowed to ask the U.S. Education Department to be exempted from some of the law’s requirements if they meet certain conditions, such as enacting standards to prepare students for college and careers and demanding more accountability of teachers and principals.

Cara Tanimura, director of the Hawaii DOE’s systems accountability office, said the state will likely decide within about two weeks whether it will pursue a waiver for this school year.

Tanimura will travel to Washington, D.C., next week to meet with federal officials and get more details on the process. "I want to proceed very deliberately," she said.

The waiver program is being welcomed by many, who contend many elements of the Bush-era education initiative have become barriers to learning and that too many schools, even those showing modest progress, risk being labeled as failing.

Increasingly, some of the state’s top public schools are facing sanctions for failing to meet annual objectives under NCLB, a situation that administrators say is frustrating teachers and confusing parents.

This year, 62 percent of Hawaii’s 286 schools failed to meet benchmarks for student reading and math proficiency under NCLB, up from 49 percent last year.

President Barack Obama planned to discuss the waiver plan today. In a statement Thursday, he said the waivers’ purpose "is not to give states and districts a reprieve from accountability, but rather to unleash energy to improve our schools at the local level."

The administration says it is acting because Congress has been slow to address the issues by rewriting the law. NCLB has been due for a rewrite since 2007.

Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz said in a statement that "President Obama’s announcement to remove outdated No Child Left Behind requirements and increase flexibility for states is great news. Hawaii’s educational team will head to Washington, D.C., to learn more about how we can take advantage of this policy, advance our current improvement efforts, and make the changes necessary to transform public education in Hawaii."

But Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., who chairs the House Education Committee, has questioned whether the Education Department has the authority to offer the waivers. He has said Obama has allowed "an arbitrary time line" to dictate when Congress should get the law rewritten, and the committee needs more time to develop proposals, which it is doing.

Kline on Thursday called the administration’s plan a political move and said he cannot support a process that sets a dangerous precedent by granting the education secretary "sweeping authority to hand-pick winners and losers."

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday that the emphasis under the waivers program will be more on growth than on test scores. "We can’t have a law on the books that’s slowing down progress, that’s slowing down innovation," he said in Joplin, Mo., where the schools were left in ruins after a tornado last May.

The No Child Left Behind law passed in 2001 with widespread bipartisan support and much fanfare. It sought to hold schools more accountable for student performance and get better-qualified teachers in classrooms. It also offers school choice and extra tutoring to students attending schools deemed failing.

Critics say the law created too much of an emphasis in classrooms on standardized tests, driving the stakes so high that it may have even fostered an environment where school officials in some districts opted to cheat. In particular, the requirement that all students be on grade level in math and reading by 2014 has been hugely unpopular.

For most Hawaii schools to meet adequate yearly progress this year, 72 percent of students had to test proficient in reading, 64 percent in math. The goals have been rising since 2001, when 30 percent of students needed to be proficient in reading and 10 percent in math.

For the past three years, schools met AYP if at least 58 percent of students were proficient in reading and 46 percent in math.

Karen Lee, executive director of P-20 Partnerships for Education, a nonprofit group that works to strengthen the "education pipeline" from early childhood to college, said though there have been a host of concerns about NCLB, there is also an acknowledgement that the law strengthened accountability, highlighted the achievement gap and increased the use of assessments to gauge student and school progress.

Star-Advertiser reporter Mary Vorsino and The Associated Press contributed to this report.