Stanford Achievement Test scores released Tuesday are a wake-up call for lawmakers to invest in public education, state education officials say.
Statewide, average scores dropped or remained the same in every subtest of the state-mandated assessment, with fifth-graders' reading and language scores at 47th percentile and 44th percentile, respectively, slipping further below the national median score of 50.The state-mandated SATs are taken by public schoolchildren in fifth, eighth and 11th grades. Scores are reported in percentiles and forwarded annually to the Legislature. A score of the 55th percentile, for instance, means those test-takers performed better than 55 percent of national peers.
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The tests, intended as an accountability measure, are only a snapshot of students and just one indication of Utah's educational quality. Still, this fall's scores are cause for alarm, said Barbara Lawrence, state coordinator of evaluation and assessment.
"It's not that we're declining so much as we're not keeping up" with the rest of the nation's investments in education, she said. "The thing we don't want to do is blame teachers. It's the support in the system that's the real problem."
For instance, some elementary school media centers are not well-stocked and classrooms don't have their own library collections to entice children to read, said Bonnie Morgan, state curriculum director. That could explain the plateaued 44th percentile score on prewriting, or use of reference materials.
Fifth-grade science scores, however, plateaued at 60th percentile, meaning those test-takers performed better than 60 percent of national counterparts.
Elementary teachers also need opportunities to upgrade their teaching skills in light of new brain research and changing demographics and more non-English speaking students to help improve educational outcomes, Morgan said.
"We're asking more of our teachers today than we ever asked of them before," she said.
But training and resources take money.
Education operates on about a $2 billion budget, or about one-third of the state's tax revenues. Utah posts one of the nation's highest birthrates, with fewer taxpayers to carry the burden than other states.
Utah also has the nation's second highest teacher-student ratio of 1-24, with the national average 1-17, and spends the least per pupil in the nation. The state spent $3,596 per student in 1996-97; the national average is $6,060.
The Legislature continues efforts for class-size reduction in elementary schools and, starting last year, middle schools, but it's not enough, Lawrence said.
For instance, the $9 million allocation to reduce class sizes in seventh and eighth grades pared just two children per teacher, rather than the 10 or fewer students teachers need so they can offer individualized help.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Scott Bean says the Legislature needs to pony up more money for elementary education, particularly for placing reading specialists in the schools. Such is requested in the Utah Board of Education's budget proposal to be forwarded to the 1999 Legislature. The price tag: $40 million.
"Investing in elementary education is not really as high as the investments in other states to increase literacy of children," Bean said.
"If the state does not start to make a serious investment in elementary education . . . we'll have serious results in the future, and they'll be negative," he said. "If that means increasing taxes to do it, we ought to be willing to do that."
Test scores are expected to rebound soon, however, Lawrence said, as reading initiatives are about to come to fruition. "I'm hoping we've reached bottom and can start back up now," she said.
Yet there are some praiseworthy notes to the SAT scores, Lawrence says, particularly 11th-graders' score of the 68th percentile on math. That means Utah high school juniors performed better than 68 percent of national test-takers -- the same as last year. High school juniors also scored at the 62nd percentile on science, with eighth-graders receiving the 58th percentile.
Eighth-graders averaged the 60th percentile in math and the 58th percentile in science, social science and thinking skills, as they did last year.
Eleventh-graders fell 10 percentile points on the social science test from the 62 percentile in 1997 to 52nd percentile in 1998. That may be due to the relatively few questions asked on the test as opposed to that administered in elementary and middle levels, meaning each question carries more weight, Lawrence said.
Lawrence notes high schools get supplemental money via fees and fund-raising to help boost educational resources, though they struggle with funds, too.
The Utah Office of Education has statewide SAT scores available online. They are at: www.usoe.k12.ut.us/eval/usoeeval.htm.