This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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 standards and methods used by the state of Utah to evaluate the quality of its various public and charter schools have changed so much over the past decade that even the people who set the rules — in the Legislature and on the Utah Board of Education — are starting to get dizzy.

And a bit more honest.

At the Tuesday meeting of the Legislature's Education Interim Committee, lawmakers of both parties confessed that their own habit of monkeying with the metrics used to determine which of the state's schools are doing well and which are not has left everyone with mountains of data that don't mean very much.

It was more than refreshing that lawmakers, including some frequent critics of the public school system, were heard to admit that constantly moving the targets that schools are expected to hit was not helping anyone. Making the standards more consistent, transparent and realistic would go a long way, not only to helping teachers and administrators do a better job, but also to ease the widespread suspicion that the evaluation system exists mostly to make the public schools look bad.

One way to improve on the situation, suggested by the school board and received well by the lawmakers, was to give up on the created-in-Utah SAGE testing regime at the high school level and instead use the national ACT college admissions test as part of the measure of success for secondary students.

Such a move would have several arguments in its favor.

They include the fact that the tests would matter more to individual students, at least those considering going on to college. That would mean students would be more likely to take the test seriously, giving the questions their full consideration rather than taking a lot of random stabs just to get through an ordeal.

It would also mean that fewer parents would be motivated to opt their children out of taking the test, a growing trend apparently based on the idea that standardized tests are somehow evil. (Unless it will help your kid get a scholarship.)

Also, using a test that has been used for decades at schools across the nation would provide state and local educators with some much more useful information about how Utah scholars stack up, across the nation and over time.

The irony, of course, is thick. The main reason why Utah invested all that money and time in the SAGE testing regime was that too many folks around here didn't want to subject their little darlings to any tests written or judged by far-away experts.

It had to be a Utah-oriented test, officials heard. As if the meaning of certain words — like, oh, irony — or the gravitational constant of the universe were different in our state than they are in Florida or Oregon.

It was only about a month ago that the argument made in this very space was that the state should stick with its SAGE testing into the future, so that data trends comparing apples to apples would be available.

That's still our argument for the tests given below the high school level. And the main point — that lawmakers and school board members should lay out their standards for academic success and stick to them long enough to learn something — stands.

Otherwise, there's not much point.