This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

A wise old African saying cautions, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Back in 2012, Utah policymakers made a hasty decision to go it alone on standardized testing, pulling out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), a coalition of more than 20 states working together to develop a Common Core-aligned test. States are — and should be — in charge of such matters, and the authority of local lawmakers should be respected. But, it's worth asking whether this particular decision did a disservice to Utah's children.

That's one possible inference from a new study published by our organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute — the first independent, comprehensive evaluation ever undertaken of SBAC and competing tests. Our analysts — highly experienced educators and content and assessment experts — found that SBAC indeed delivers on its promise to be a high-quality, challenging test that's well matched to the new standards that Utah and most other states adopted in 2010.

This is a significant accomplishment. The standardized tests that most states had been using previously were criticized for decades, and for good reason. They were mostly cheap, low-level, fill-in-the-blank tests that were easy to game and that encouraged teachers to spend endless classroom hours on mindless test-prep.

By 2010, when the Common Core initiative emerged, policymakers in Utah and most other states had recognized these problems and set out to address them. Their solution was to replace the old tests with "next generation" assessments like SBAC and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC). About half of states administered one of these two tests in 2014-15 — and these turned out to be, by no small margin, the highest-rated tests in our evaluation.

Along the way, however, the Common Core became politically radioactive, which led some states, including Utah to bail on the common assessments, even while holding the line on the underlying standards.

Today, nobody can be sure whether the alternative test that Utah has adopted — known as SAGE — is a good one, as there's never been an independent evaluation of it such as the one just completed for SBAC and the other national exams. Beehive State policymakers should commission an independent evaluation, pronto. Objective reviewers — including teachers and other content and assessment experts — should determine whether the test places sufficient emphasis on the most important content needed for college and career readiness and whether it expects all students to demonstrate the full range of thinking skills called for by the rigorous standards that Utah's schools are supposed to be implementing.

Given the powerful effects that tests have on what happens in schools, the crucial criterion for judging them is simply put: Does the test encourage the kind of curriculum and instruction we want for children? In the case of SBAC, the answer from our review is, "Yes." Teachers, parents, and taxpayers in Utah should be concerned that, for SAGE, the answer is, "We don't know." Getting a better answer needs to be an urgent priority.

Michael J. Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio are president and senior fellow of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.