This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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.

The fact that the levels of student proficiency on Utah's SAGE tests have inched up over the three years the system has been in use does not necessarily mean that our children are getting smarter. It might just mean that they — their teachers and their parents — are getting used to the tests.

And that's a good thing.

Measuring how well students are doing — individually, by district, by school and by ethnic, economic and other subdivisions — is crucial to building a functioning educational system. Otherwise, we have no idea whether the students are making necessary, even minimal, progress until they show up at work or in college.

When it is all but too late to do anything about it.

And unless a state or a district sticks with the same basic testing over several years, it is impossible to know whether anyone is making improvements year-to-year.

At the same time, high-pressure testing regimes that stress everyone out as they soak up way too much classroom time and energy are counterproductive to real academic and emotional growth.

Ideally, measuring student progress — individually and by cohorts that can be sliced and diced to reveal all kinds of trends — would be ongoing, seamless, all but invisible. Progress would be measured from day to day, not just year to year, giving teachers, administrators and parents constant feedback rather than one massive data dump at the end of the year.

When it is all but too late to do anything about it.

But, until our software systems are up to that challenge, SAGE is what we have and we should make the best of it. And that means paying attention to the results not only statewide or across districts, but as divided by ethnic group, income level and other characteristics that, as the latest results again show, are basically predictive of how students will fare in their levels of SAGE proficiency in math, science and language.

Again this year, data gleaned from the SAGE tests show that our basic educational system does well enough for students who don't need the help, but those students who are at risk of trailing behind can easily wind up in a freefall from which it can be all but impossible to recover.

The obvious solution is for the state to put more resources into support services — counseling, tutoring, after-school programs, family support — that will help those who consistently do poorly on standardize tests such as SAGE.

Otherwise, there's not much point in testing them. Or in having schools at all.