New assessment brings changes to school grading system

New assessment brings changes to school grading system

(Shutterstock)


Save Story
Leer en español

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's school grading system will see some changes in light of SAGE, the new annual student assessment that found most students below a new standard of proficiency.

State education officials are making adjustments to how the grades are calculated to account for the change in assessment, aiming for a similar distribution as last year's grades, according to Judy Park, associate superintendent of the Utah State Office of Education.

"That doesn't mean the same schools will get the same grade. It just means the same percentage of schools will receive each grade," Park said during an Education Interim Committee meeting Wednesday. "We're currently still trying to figure out those adjustments that will need to be made to allow for that distribution."

Last year, 11 percent of schools earned an A grade, 45 percent earned a B, 30 percent earned a C, 10 percent earned a D, and 4 percent earned an F.

The deadline for the public release of this year's school grades is Dec. 15, and state officials are "hopeful" that the calculations for each school will be complete by then, Park said.

With 2014 being a baseline year for SAGE results, next year is expected to show improved scores as teachers and students become familiar with the test and the new standard. The Legislature approved a one-time adjustment to the school grading system in light of the transition to SAGE from the CRT, the state's former year-end assessment.


The entire system was developed based on CRTs, so it would be great if they would look at the entire system now that we have a completely different assessment system.

–Judy Park, associate superintendent of the Utah State Office of Education


But it remains unclear if lawmakers will approve another adjustment to the school grading system to account for the expected rise in SAGE scores.

"The entire system was developed based on CRTs, so it would be great if they would look at the entire system now that we have a completely different assessment system," Park said.

Rep. Rich Cunningham, R-South Jordan, cited aspects of the grading policy that continue to raise concerns among educators. Some teachers, he said, don't want special needs students in their classes because of how the school's grade may be affected.

Cunningham said revisions to the statute should be made so that students with disabilities aren't counted in a school's final score.

"That's a real challenge in my opinion that we make sure that we address that correctly," Cunningham said. "We need to make sure we're taking care of that."

Some teachers have also misinterpreted a portion of the statute that links compensation with student performance, believing that one-third of their pay will be suspended if student performance is poor, according to Cunningham.

Brad Smith, the state's newly appointed superintendent of public instruction, said that while the coupling of pay with student performance is slated to go into effect in the 2016-17 school year, it applies only to incremental increases in pay over time, not to the totality of compensation.

Smith said such concerns are "unintended consequences" of the statute that is intended to focus on transparency, accountability and helping individual students.

"I think we have to go back and ask ourselves, 'What's the desired outcome of an assessment system?'" Smith said. "If it is to rank schools in the same way that we rank our football teams, then you're going to have that outcome.

"I would suggest the actual intended outcome of an assessment is to help teachers see ways to meet the needs of individual kids," he said. "So we have to be very careful about the about the kinds of causation and other statistical inferences we're drawing from the results because the intended outcome is to help teachers, not in any sense to penalize them."

Related stories

Most recent Utah stories

Related topics

Utah
Morgan Jacobsen

    STAY IN THE KNOW

    Get informative articles and interesting stories delivered to your inbox weekly. Subscribe to the KSL.com Trending 5.
    By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to KSL.com's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    KSL Weather Forecast