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Lawmakers signaled their intent to update Utah's student testing and school grading laws on Tuesday.
After nearly three hours of discussion on school assessment and accountability, the Legislature's Education Interim Committee voted to open a bill file and begin drafting legislation based in part on recommendations from the Utah Board of Education.
Those recommendations include replacing SAGE, Utah's year-end testing system, with ACT testing for high school students, and modifying school grading to award points for metrics like decreased absenteeism, course credit recovery, Advanced Placement and honors program participation, and early elementary reading levels.
"I think we're focusing on the place where student success really originates," said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper. "And that is in success before third grade."
School districts currently have the option of using the ACT exam in place of SAGE for high school juniors, a change lawmakers approved during the most recent legislative session.
Canyons School District and Jordan School District will use the ACT option, abandoning SAGE for 11th grade. Granite School District will continue using SAGE for 11th-graders, as will Davis School District for math and science.
Under the school board's recommendations, high school freshmen and sophomores would use ACT Aspire, a suite of preparatory ACT tests, before participating in the traditional ACT exam during their junior years.
ACT tests traditionally are completed in a single sitting, compared with the multiple-day format of SAGE, and they allow for national comparisons of student performance.
"It would drastically reduce the time spent testing at that level," said school board member Brittney Cummins.
But changes to school grading would mark the sixth consecutive year that the law has been amended since its implementation in 2011.
This year, the law was changed to make the grading scale more difficult when too many schools receive A or B grades.
Several school administrators told The Salt Lake Tribune that they received an initial grade, only to see that grade downgraded over the span of a couple days.
The annual changes have frustrated educators, said Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay, and the program appears to have done nothing to improve schools in the state.
Parents' ability to waive their children's year-end tests, the former educator said, undermines the grades, which are based primarily on test scores.
"We're skewing the results to the point where they're completely invalid," Moss said. "If it's just a complicated measure for these fine folks here that have to deal with it, why do we persist in doing it?"
Stephenson said lawmakers need to "seriously consider" Moss' questions. Nations that outrank the United States in education metrics, he said, typically are not focused on standardized testing.
"I think we have to admit that the SAGE test, especially for secondary students, is not statistically valid," he said.
Rep. Brad Last, R-Hurricane, acknowledged that lawmakers had "changed the game" by allowing students to opt out of annual testing.
But he added that issues like testing and school grading exist in a political environment, and he alluded to the influence of individuals or groups that advocate for performance data and school accountability.
"Some of the people that are very motivated about that," he said, "are not in this room."
The intention behind school grading was sincere, he said, and a grading system that accurately measured school effort would benefit policymakers and the public.
"The school grading does have value," he said. "But it's only as good as the formula that we create to come up with the school grading."
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