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SALT LAKE CITY — A discussion in the Utah legislature's Public Education Appropriations subcommittee this week turned into a debate over the state's year-old SAGE exam, and standardized testing in general.
Rep. Justin Fawson, R-North Ogden, took issue with the idea of Utah selling its test questions to other states, which started the debate.
"I don't support SAGE high stakes testing, and so, to that end, I can't support additional development of assessment questions for that test," Fawson said at Thursday's committee meeting.
Rep. Norman Thurston, R-Provo, also disliked the idea.
"We tend to be competing with private entities that could and should be developing these questions and distributing them nationwide," Thurston said. "I don't know why state government has decided to get involved in the business of developing and selling test questions."
That led to a discussion about the low test results that Utah students scored in 2014, the first year the SAGE exam was administered. Rep. LaVar Christensen, R-Draper, told the committee the low scores led him to doubt the accuracy of the results.
"It sounds like we're fostering things out of state that we would maybe push back against if we were on the receiving end, so it just seems to have so many inherent contradictions," Christensen said.
Others, like Sen. Jani Iwamoto, D-Holladay, like the idea of keeping both the exam and its questions.
I don't support SAGE high stakes testing, and so, to that end, I can't support additional development of assessment questions for that test.
–Rep. Justin Fawson, R-North Ogden
"It's helped students in my district greatly," Iwamoto said, "and we are setting it up to fail. We haven't given it a chance."
Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, chairs the subcommittee, and said a task force would be created to examine SAGE and consider getting rid of it. But he tells Utah's Morning News there's nothing wrong with the accuracy of the SAGE exam.
"We're finally being honest in reporting the performance of Utah students," Stephenson said in a live interview on KSL. "The previous UPASS scores were re-jiggered every year to make us look like we were having annual yearly progress when we weren't."
Stephenson, however, is a proponent of ending all end-of-level exams like SAGE testing, because he feels they now take up so much time away from classroom learning, they are counterproductive.
"My reason for doing away with the test is because they change the focus of education to be just basically on math and reading and writing, and nothing else," Stephenson said.
He pointed to international report cards comparing the performance of U.S. students with the performance of students in other countries, saying the one thing successful schools overseas don't do is year-end exams.
"Not a single one of them has high-stakes, end-of-level tests," Stephenson said. "Instead they focus on high-quality instruction and measurements throughout the year that indicate mastery, and they accept mastery and validate mastery when it occurs throughout the year, rather than having an autopsy test at the end of the year."
He also dislikes the idea that students must take end-of-level writing assessments in February, as is happening now in Utah, far before the end of the year, in order to accommodate the computer lab space needed.
Listen to Sen. Stephenson's interview with KSL Newsradio:
"SAGE is taking away hours and hours and hours of instruction, and these are mandates from the legislature and the federal government," Gallagher-Fishbaugh said. "This isn't [the Utah State Office of Education] doing something to teachers and kids. These are things that we have to do based on mandates."
Gallagher-Fishbaugh describes the mandated exams as "being perversely used."
"And that's the problem, is that the focus has become on the test, to grade schools, to tie teacher salaries, to how their students perform, it's being used in evaluation," Gallagher-Fishbaugh said. "It's really very, very much an educational malpractice in my mind."
Gallagher-Fishbaugh says the state office of education was also required to implement SAGE without being given money to do so properly, let alone the time and technology.
"Quite frankly, I think we need to get back to what tests are used for, which is to inform instruction, not to grade a teacher and certainly not to grade a school," Gallagher-Fishbaugh said.
Listen to Gallagher-Fishbaugh's interview with KSL Newsradio:
Becky Bruce is the executive producer of Utah's Morning News on KSL Newsradio.
