Utah students consistently earn average test scores compared with nationwide peers, yet the state has a wider-than-average gap between high achievers and struggling students. What do standardized test scores say about Utah's schools and what can parents and others conclude from such statistics? Does Utah, with its unique demographics, spend enough to ensure a quality education for all students?

Jordan Warsoff is a student Utah education officials love to tout. The senior at Salt Lake City's West High School has loaded up on advanced classes and aced nearly every standardized test he has taken. College "has never not been a consideration" for him.

Yet state and national assessments suggest Warsoff is a West High anomaly.

The school's standardized test scores trail state averages in most categories. And despite having been selected last month by Newsweek magazine as the best high school in Utah, West has failed to make "adequate yearly progress" mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reform law in three of the past four years.

The bar, though, is inherently higher at West, where more than one-third of students still are learning English and roughly half hail from low-income families. Few enjoy Warsoff's advantages. He has to look three generations back to find a relative who didn't go to college.

Most students are more like Erick Villegas, an average student who views his education as a way to escape the working-class struggles of his Latino community. The sophomore acknowledges he took advantage of high school's freedoms to "hang out with friends and slough a lot." He buckled down after he fell half a credit behind but struggles in classes that are often more crowded and less hands-on than Warsoff's.

West's diverse mix of student experiences and backgrounds doesn't shine through in black-and-white test scores. Such statistics can reflect poorly on West when compared with schools such as Highland's Lone Peak High School, where more than 95 percent of students are white, fewer than 1 percent are learning English and a scant 8.5 percent are poor.

Lone Peak has met NCLB requirements for the past three years and most test scores exceed state averages. Yet the school's math scores lag 20 percentage points behind the district norm and 15 points behind the state average. So what's a discerning parent to conclude? Standardized test scores provide a bar for parents and for policymakers to measure school success, and such measurements take on added importance in Utah, which is constantly trying to assess whether low per-pupil spending affects education quality.

Standardized tests, though, are far from perfect and conflicting results often yield more confusion than clarity.

State's report card: Utah administers no fewer than six brands of standardized tests to its public school students - sometimes as many as five rounds a year. Yet even educators disagree when asked how Utah students are doing.

Some cite Utah's status as third in the nation for its 20.8 percent of high school graduates who have passed an Advanced Placement (AP) test. Others point to state assessments showing roughly 75 percent of Utah's students are "proficient" in reading and math. A few rural districts approach 90 percent proficiency. But urban districts and those with high minority populations hover closer to 60 to 65 percent.

Achievement gaps for most minority groups persist across grades and districts. In both math and reading, the proficiency rate of poor students lags 10 points below the average; the percentage of proficient Latino students trails another 10 points. Those chasms are even wider for science proficiency.

"I don't think our average kids compete with average kids from other states," said Phillip Sakashita, a West High math teacher. He believes Utah's high achievers, who excel in national competitions, buoy the state's overall scores.

But tests don't tell the whole story, and it's not fair to judge Utah's schools on those scores alone, said Deborah Swensen, test-development coordinator at the Utah Office of Education. She said parents should look at "the whole picture," including programs, attendance records and the wide array of state and national assessments.

The nation's report card: Like it or not, test scores do dictate how people view schools. One of the most well-known gauges is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card" or simply NAEP.

On the surface, Utah fares well. In most categories, Utah's overall percentage of students "at or above basic" edges out the national average. But a closer look suggests the performance stems from Utah's large population of white students, who tend to score better on such tests.

Demographic breakdowns reveal Utah's white students aren't outperforming the nation's white students - there are just more of them to boost the overall average. And achievement gaps separating white students from Latinos and those with disabilities are more stark in Utah than the nation as a whole. But Utah does better than the nation in educating students of low-income and those learning English.

As a tool for comparing states against each other, the NAEP can't be beaten. It can't gauge how well Utah is teaching its own core curriculum, but it does provide insight into the core's level of difficulty.

In more than a dozen states, students have a far easier time meeting the "proficient" level on state tests than on the NAEP. In Utah, 72 percent of eighth-graders were "proficient" on the 2005 state math test, while only 30 percent hit that level on the national test. At least six states had a wider gap than Utah's. Only a handful of states showed similar pass rates on state and NAEP tests.

What's in a test: Such discrepancies have led to claims that states have "dumbed down" their assessments, especially since the No Child Left Behind Act put state test results under a microscope. But several studies suggest NAEP designers set the "proficiency" bar too high.

The National Academy of Sciences conducted a congressionally mandated evaluation of the program in the late 1990s. It concluded the process for setting achievement levels is "fundamentally flawed," "internally inconsistent," "produced unreasonable results" and lacks evidence of validity.

Studies by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Education and the Center for Research and Evaluation reached similar conclusions, according to Gerald Bracey, a nonresident fellow at the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.

So since 2001, NAEP achievement levels technically are used only on a "trial basis" until a proven alternative can be found.

"These achievement levels should continue to be . . . interpreted and used with caution," reads a NAEP disclaimer from the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP.

So the NAEP provides a valid way to compare student performance across states, but paints a distorted picture of dismal U.S. proficiency levels. In fact, the math and science tests would deem students in all but a handful of Asian nations below proficient, according to a new analysis from the American Institutes of Research.

"These things are such handy bludgeons," Bracey said. "The U.S. Department of Education uses it all the time - it clucks its tongue and says only 30 percent of kids can read at the proficient level."

Success is slow: When considering assessment results, parents and policymakers need to remember that a single test doesn't tell the whole story, said Joan Herman, director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's a very limited snapshot," she said.

"Ask anyone about how any test they've ever taken in their life showed their capability - they'd say it couldn't and it didn't," she said. "In aggregating these test scores we forget that."

NAEP's achievement standards may be unreasonably high, but its scores still provide a valuable gauge of learning trends, Herman said. Those trends reveal fairly constant quality of education when analyzed group by demographic group.

State and national tests suggest a persistent problem getting certain populations up to speed.

Closing the achievement gap is a priority for Utah's education leaders, but like the rest of the nation, success is slow in the face of a rapidly changing population amid funding constraints.

"For poor kids and immigrant kids, we've never done that well," Herman said. "And those populations are growing."

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* NICOLE STRICKER can be reached at nstricker@sltrib.com or 801-257-8999.