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When school grades were released last week, West Valley City's Granger Elementary earned its third consecutive D.
The school scored 178 points out of a possible 600, continuing a three-year downward trend.
And a separate report released last week showed Granger earning 158 out of a total 600 points, placing the school below the average for both the state and Granite School District.
For parents attempting to decipher the different reports, or wondering why they show a 20-point disparity, Principal Amber Clayton said she's as curious as they are.
"We start out by trying to understand what each of [the reports] mean," she said. "Because the same sets of data need to serve different purposes, it can be very confusing for everybody."
Those purposes are largely political.
Utah's waiver from No Child Left Behind Act requires the state to make an annual report of student performance on SAGE, the state's computerized year-end test.
State lawmakers, unsatisfied with the federal requirements, created their own accountability system in 2011 that relies on SAGE scores to label each school with a single letter grade.
And the State School Board, under its own authority, elected to create the PACE Report Card in 2014, a third school-accountability system designed by the governor's office to track progress toward statewide education goals.
For Clayton, the most useful information is the raw data that school administrators receive in the spring after student complete SAGE, months before the myriad state reports arrive in September.
"Anytime you're in public service, you're dealing with political reality," Clayton said. "The reports that came out last week meet those bureaucratic needs, but they don't necessarily meet school needs."
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Carrot and stick • Utah's grading system was given extra bite this year — beyond the stigma of an F or D grade — when lawmakers passed SB235, a school "turnaround" law.
Using the school-grading system as its measuring stick, the new program will award schools that improve their grades with up to $5,000 per teacher, "subject to appropriations by the Legislature."
For consistently low-performing schools, the bill creates a stable of independent, or private, turnaround experts who would work with administrators and teachers to improve test scores.
If failing schools continue to fail, the bill allows for district schools to be converted into state-run charter schools and for charters to be shut down or absorbed by other schools.
"The thing that we're trying to do is provide some special and unique help for some of the schools that are struggling in the state," said Rep. Brad Last, R-Hurricane, SB235's House sponsor.
Clayton said she feels "tremendous" anxiety at the prospect of being one of the schools targeted for improvement under the turnaround program.
She said teachers are already working to boost student performance, and the potential of a salary bonus if they succeed carries less weight than the threat of school sanctions if they fail.
"I don't think my teachers are worried about pay-for-performance," she said. "What I worry about is the punitive nature."
Independent of the turnaround law, the Utah Office of Education has created its own program to help schools with low SAGE scores.
Rather than send outside experts into a school, the program, called Assessment to Achievement, invited teams of principals and teachers from 45 schools to meet with state education managers in June for training on SAGE data analysis and goal setting.
Linda Roundy, a library media teacher at Nibley Park Elementary in east Salt Lake City, said the June meetings were beneficial, helping to clarify what the SAGE scores reveal about school performance.
She said programs that honor the professionalism of teachers are more successful at effecting change without scaring away new educators.
"If you come in top-down with a heavy hand, you will lose the newest, brightest kids," she said. "They aren't willing to work that hard for so little pay."
Last said it is appropriate for the state to take steps to improve school performance, rather than continue to label schools as failing without providing help.
He said any new program requires time and patience to evaluate its efficacy, adding that amendments to both school grading and school turnaround could be presented in the future.
"The grading system is only as good as the formula behind the grading system," he said. "I'm not sure we have the grading system right."
Since its creation in 2011, Utah's school-grading law has been amended during each legislative session, most recently to exempt schools that cater to students with special needs.
All three reports showed improved performance for the state as a whole.
The number of schools receiving an A grade climbed from 99 to 123, while the number of F grades fell from 27 to 23.
And Utah's average score on the federally required accountability report increased from 367 points in 2014 to 381 points in 2015.
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Three's a crowd • In the past, state education managers had hoped to unite Utah's separate school-performance reports into a single system.
But those efforts gained little traction among lawmakers supportive of the school-grading system.
The state could have used school grading to fulfill federal requirements, but lawmakers were unwilling to make the necessary changes. In particular, lawmakers have designed the school-grading system to hold schools harmless when parents opt their children out of SAGE testing.
"There were these sticking points that neither one was willing to give up, and then the governor wanted his plan — the PACE plan," said Jo Ellen Shaeffer, assessment and accountability director for the Utah Office of Education. Shaeffer said it is still the preference of the state office to use a single reporting system. But that would require cooperation that so far hasn't been politically possible.
"Could we get all the players in a room to agree?" she asked. "I'm not sure, and we haven't to this point."
Shaeffer acknowledged the potential confusion of issuing three performance reports for each school in the state.
There's a give-and-take between clarity and specificity, she said, and the challenge has been to create a system that informs parents about what's happening without drowning them in data points.
"The one that is the easiest for me to understand," she said, "is the PACE report."
PACE, which lists metrics such as school diversity, demographics and graduation rates along with test scores, was also endorsed by Sharon Gallagher-Fishbaugh, president of the Utah Education Association.
She said the practice of using a single measurement, like SAGE scores, to grade schools is a "flawed concept."
"Anytime you try to narrow down what a school is doing to one measure," she said, "you're going to get information that does nothing to help you move forward."
Shaeffer said that whichever report parents or policymakers focus on, they should look for trends rather than a snapshot.
"I would look for improvement over time," she said. "A single point in time isn't going to be the best reference to you."
All three reports for each school can be found on the Utah Office of Education website.