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Education has been used as political football for ages. It really wasn't until Sputnik that our nation (Eisenhower) really began to push for all students under the age of 18 to attend (and graduate) from high school. Regan's administration (for political reasons) put out the dubious "Nation at Risk" report; whose findings have mostly been debunked since. But hey, it served its purpose! It hurt unions, started the charter school movement, and helped funnel millions to private interests.
Educators were never consulted about George W Bush's No Child Left Behind. Teacher unions warned that this program was going to be a waste of time for students and teachers and would hinder the education process than help. They were right. It was never properly funded, which really only set up urban and poverty stricken schools up for failure.
Common Core, while a somewhat decent idea of each state agreeing on common standards and assessments to help students acquire a set standard of knowledge and skills, doesn't exactly work in practice. Yeah yeah, we all know about the "new math" that no one can understand. While this gets the most attention, the dirty little secret about Common Core, ESPECIALLY in Utah, is that many affluent students with involved parents will opt-out of the testing associated with Common Core. This drives school scores down, thus skewing the data against Utah schools, educators, and our entire system.
Legally, according to the legislature, SAGE scores can not be used on a student's grade. So students literally have zero incentive to actually try on the test. This has led to many teachers becoming frustrated with the test as their evaluations (up until about 2017-2018) and their school's grade (up until 2018) could be determined by students who would begin the SAGE and quickly finish it without actually trying. I mean, I don't blame them. If you're going to make me take a test that takes hours to complete, you better make it worth something. Right? So many of the poor scores we saw as a state were not necessarily indicative of poor teachers, stupid kids, or messed up schools.
Since then, we've made some improvements.
Utah is no longer "grading" schools anymore nor is the SAGE used on teacher evaluations. So it's less publicly embarrassing. However, according to state code R277-404-6, schools still cannot use student data on these tests to figure into grades. You can tell this is one of my pet peeves with this... So how can we really consider the data gained by state testing to be reliable when (a) The most affluent and involved opt-out and (b) students literally have zero incentive to try?
Schools that consistently score poorly on standardized end of year tests can still be shut down by the state. The new test replacing SAGE, for those of you wondering, is called RISE (for grades below 9), ASPIRE (for grades 9-10), and grades 11-12 will see no change as they've always just used the ACT.
Educators were never consulted about George W Bush's No Child Left Behind. Teacher unions warned that this program was going to be a waste of time for students and teachers and would hinder the education process than help. They were right. It was never properly funded, which really only set up urban and poverty stricken schools up for failure.
Common Core, while a somewhat decent idea of each state agreeing on common standards and assessments to help students acquire a set standard of knowledge and skills, doesn't exactly work in practice. Yeah yeah, we all know about the "new math" that no one can understand. While this gets the most attention, the dirty little secret about Common Core, ESPECIALLY in Utah, is that many affluent students with involved parents will opt-out of the testing associated with Common Core. This drives school scores down, thus skewing the data against Utah schools, educators, and our entire system.
Legally, according to the legislature, SAGE scores can not be used on a student's grade. So students literally have zero incentive to actually try on the test. This has led to many teachers becoming frustrated with the test as their evaluations (up until about 2017-2018) and their school's grade (up until 2018) could be determined by students who would begin the SAGE and quickly finish it without actually trying. I mean, I don't blame them. If you're going to make me take a test that takes hours to complete, you better make it worth something. Right? So many of the poor scores we saw as a state were not necessarily indicative of poor teachers, stupid kids, or messed up schools.
Since then, we've made some improvements.
Utah is no longer "grading" schools anymore nor is the SAGE used on teacher evaluations. So it's less publicly embarrassing. However, according to state code R277-404-6, schools still cannot use student data on these tests to figure into grades. You can tell this is one of my pet peeves with this... So how can we really consider the data gained by state testing to be reliable when (a) The most affluent and involved opt-out and (b) students literally have zero incentive to try?
Schools that consistently score poorly on standardized end of year tests can still be shut down by the state. The new test replacing SAGE, for those of you wondering, is called RISE (for grades below 9), ASPIRE (for grades 9-10), and grades 11-12 will see no change as they've always just used the ACT.
