SALT LAKE CITY — The first results of SAGE, a new year-end student assessment aligned with Utah's Common Core Standards, brought reactions that ranged from excitement to constructive disappointment Monday.

But a common theme echoing from local educators and state officials is that the drop in proficiency — which rendered more than half of Utah's students below the acceptable standard — was not altogether unexpected.

"It's not a surprise," Gov. Gary Herbert said. "Our educators have told us because we've raised the bar on proficiency that we're going to have lower scores against that benchmark."

The Utah State Office of Education released the results Monday, showing that almost 60 percent of Utah's students do not meet the standard of proficiency — now defined as being college- and career-ready — in English language arts, math and science.

The standards were raised with Utah's 2010 adoption of the Common Core in an effort to reduce the amount of remedial training that colleges and universities are having to provide for incoming students. The Common Core State Standards apply only to language arts and math.

SAGE manifested a statewide need for improvement, but the results also revealed strengths in places such as the Cache County School District. That district had proficiency rates of about 57 percent in language arts and math, and about 59 percent in science, which altogether average as the highest aggregate scores among Utah's public school districts.

"We're ecstatic over them," Curt Jenkins, curriculum director for the district, said of the results. "You look at those scores initially and it makes you worried, but parents shouldn't be worried about that because the expectations have increased so dramatically. We're pleased with the progress we've made."

Proficiency rates for the Ogden School District were about 28 percent, 20 percent and 27 percent for language arts, math and science, respectively. While those rates averaged the lowest among public school districts in the state, they showed that regular formative assessments in the district accurately mirror student performance in the year-end SAGE exam, according to district spokesman Zac Williams.

"Generally, we are not surprised as a district because we have a system of what we call common interim assessments, and they give us an indicator of the areas that need improvement," Williams said. "One positive is that those SAGE scores kind of validate that that system has been working for us."

Paradigm shift

Kim Panter has been teaching fourth grade for 18 years. While she was pleased with how well her students at Nibley Elementary performed in the SAGE test, she said transitioning to a new curriculum is still an ongoing process for both students and teachers.

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Results from the first set of year-end school testing known as SAGE don't look great.

"It's definitely challenging," Panter said. "It's a whole new way of thinking if you're old-school, which I've been teaching quite a few years. It's a whole paradigm shift."

The SAGE test also introduces a new method of testing. The computer-adaptive exam relies heavily on questions without multiple-choice answers, requiring students to formulate an answer themselves. Some parents have been critical of the test, arguing that the system limits educators' flexibility in the classroom, taking away the human aspect of testing.

"I think it puts more stress on (the students)," said Julie McCleary, a member of Utahns Against Common Core. "There's some kids that are really smart, but it takes them a little longer. They can still get to the right answer, but they go about it a different way. I think it's incentivizing for them (to not) want to be there."

McCleary was part of a minority that opted their children out of SAGE testing last spring. She says establishing curriculum should remain a local responsibility, specifically for teachers.

"It's just not the education I remember," she said.

Data-driven learning, however, has brought improvements to places such as the Ogden School District, where high school graduation rates have steadily climbed since regular Common Core assessments began.

Panter says one exam is hardly a reflection of a student's work in an entire school year. But the information learned from SAGE serves as a compass for teachers in making large or slight adjustments that help students in future years, she said.

"It directs my instruction for my class now, but it also changes how I'm going to plan and what I need to focus on based on last year's kids that I taught," Panter said. "It's been a challenge. But my perspective as a teacher is (that) our job changes every day, every minute, every second with every child. … Challenging, yes. Stressful, yes. But doable, yes."

Making adjustments

Statewide objectives in improvement have not been identified, but some districts are giving individual schools the flexibility to set their own achievement goals, according to Tim Smith, assessment director for the Cache County School District.

"The best work is done on the front lines of those teachers that are interacting with students and setting those goals where they want to get to," Smith said.

While it may be too soon to establish specific percentage gains, many districts have already identified areas that need additional focus. On a district level in Cache County, it's in language arts and math for third-graders. In Panter's classroom, it's in multiplication and patterns.

The Ogden School District has been gathering student performance data for months, in addition to year-end SAGE results, and some improvement initiatives are already underway, Williams said.

"One thing that we've recognized (is) we need to have a much greater emphasis on secondary math," he said. "We've set up a math task force to look at our secondary schools, creating plans and really focusing on that."

SAGE also presents opportunities to test on content that was often overlooked because it was historically untestable in traditional assessments, according to Bonita Richins, K-12 math and STEM specialist for the Cache County School District.

"With the new SAGE testing, they could test on items that weren't necessarily multiple-choice answers," Richins said. "They could test students on their thinking and their thought process in solving problems. So I think that raised the bar for the teachers to implement those standards and teach them those things."

SAGE also gives educators the opportunity to turn to peer schools and districts to compare data and to learn from each other, according to Jeannette Christenson, principal at Nibley Elementary.

"I want to know what some of my other schools in close proximity are doing better," Christenson said. She added that seeing scores from other schools prompts the question, "What are you doing differently than (what) I do?"

Some improvements have been proposed for the SAGE test itself, such as shortening the two 60-minute writing assessments and making results available faster. State officials say next year's results will come sooner now that proficiency standards have been established.

Statewide implications

SAGE results will be included in December's PACE report card — a new school accountability program headed by the governor's office.

In contrast with the state's previous school accountability program, the PACE report card does not include year-end assessments in a calculation of a final score. Instead, SAGE results are listed on the report itself as a transparency measure, according to Tami Pyfer, Herbert's education adviser.

Critics of the report card program say it would unfairly label schools and result in local complications, such as a drop in housing values surrounding schools with poor results. But such claims are hard to substantiate, according to Kelly Jorgensen, director of the Utah Field Office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"I don't know of any specific statistics that HUD has right now, especially just isolated to Utah, that has a correlation between school test scores and housing values," he said. "I don't know if you could pull one variable and do a good job of measuring that."

The report card and SAGE are part of the governor's "66 by 2020" plan, which calls for two-thirds of all Utah adults to hold either a technical certification or college degree by 2020.

A student's individual SAGE scores will not influence college enrollment, which relies primarily on ACT scores, grade-point averages and transcripts, according to Melanie Heath, spokeswoman for the Utah System of Higher Education. The SAGE results, however, mirror recent ACT benchmarks and the number of students who need remediation once they enter a college or university, she said.

The SAGE program has garnered national attention, with several states each offering Utah millions of dollars to license Utah's SAGE computer-adaptive assessments in their own schools until they develop their own programs, according to Randy Shumway, CEO of the Cicero Group, a global strategy consulting firm based in Salt Lake City.

"What the state of Utah developed is widely admired," Shumway said. "It's not merely an appropriate standard, it's the perfect standard. … These assessments allow teachers and parents to know what students are actually learning, what's working and the degree to which our students know or can apply these most critical higher-order skills."

Contributing: Whitney Evans

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