Results showing how Utah students stack up nationally on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills — dubbed by the State Office of Education as an important part of its school accountability plan — were released at a State Board of Education meeting Thursday, but they were not listed on the agenda for formal discussion.
The state board agenda gave no public notice that the norm-reference test results — the only yardstick measuring student achievement prior to the 2000 U-PASS law — were to be discussed in the board's Thursday meeting.
Members of the board's curriculum committee received and briefly discussed data handed them in their Thursday morning meeting, two board members said. Utah students outscored national peers on the exams.
"We regret it was not on the agenda," State Board Chairman Kim Burningham said. "Certainly (there was) no attempt to cover it up."
The Utah Open and Public Meetings Act requires public bodies to post items for discussion, with reasonable specificity, with at least 24 hours notice. The idea is to alert the public to topics of interest so it can listen in.
Attorney Carol Lear, director of school law and legislation for the State Office of Education, said the law also allows non-agenda items to be discussed, as long as there is no vote. In this case, no votes were taken.
"Given this, I don't think there was any violation of the law," Lear said. She said the board is careful to adhere to the open meetings act.
The lack of agenda posting also was not a signal that the test scores were unimportant. "It's the only national comparison we have," board member Teresa Theurer said. "I definitely think it's an oversight."
The Iowa Tests are national, norm-reference tests required of Utah's third-, fifth-, eighth- and 11th-graders. They are scored in percentiles, which tell where Utah students fell in relation to a national norm group that's held as the standard for scoring, with a median score of 50. Utah students took the exams, required under the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students (U-PASS), in September and October.
The test's standard has changed. A new norm group took the test and a different median score was set based on its performance. The norm group outperformed the old one. Utah students outperformed the new norm group, but not by as much as they had the old group.
Third-graders scored in the 48th percentile in language and math but in the 58th percentile for reading, the 61st for social studies and 63rd for science. The total composite was the 58th percentile, meaning those students outperformed 58 percent of the national norm group.
Fifth-graders also had a 58th percentile composite score, with the strongest showing in the 65th percentile in science. Eighth-graders posted an identical high science score and posted a 56th percentile composite. Eleventh-graders were strongest in reading, where they scored a 62nd percentile, and had a 59th percentile composite.
But the state also showed how Utah students would have done had they been compared to the old norm group. Those composites are identical for 11th-graders but significantly higher for other grades: the 64th, 63rd and 58th percentile for third-, fifth- and eighth-graders, respectively.
"The performance of Utah is pretty stable on the Iowa," testing director Judy Park said. But she has "huge concerns" on achievement gaps, which also aren't closing on the exam. In some cases, gaps between student groups span 20 percentile points.
Whites and Asian composites across grade levels are in the 60s, compared to composites in the 30s for American Indian, Hispanic students and those learning English. Low-income and Pacific Island students scored in the mid-40s. Special-education students scored in the 20s and 30s.
"We see the same thing on the CRT (state end-of-the-year tests) in NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) and in the Iowa. I think it's something everyone's concerned about. I'm really hopeful in this (legislative) session we'll see a focus on the achievement gap and attention to what the board is requesting" to narrow it, Park said.
The state board is seeking $7.5 million to offer full-day kindergarten to at-risk students, $28.7 million to improve literacy and math achievement and $6.7 million to help English language-learners, for example.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Patti Harrington passed out the scores to the full board Thursday, but there was no discussion.
"There are reasons to say hooray, and reasons to say why didn't we do better," she said. "We need to spend some time around this test, and we'll do so (at a future meeting). ... We wanted to get them to you as quickly as we could."
E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com