- Emphasizing the arts in education helped one Utah school improve their low ranking.
- As a whole state, Utah was above average compared to rest of U.S.
- The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford compiled standardized testing scores and ranked schools, districts and states nationally.
At Magna Elementary, principal Ben Peters knew something wasn’t working. Test scores were low at the Granite district school, absences were high and the community wasn’t as involved as it could be.
So in August 2025, the school got a full makeover. Magna Elementary became Magna STEAM Academy, a school dedicated to incorporating the arts into education with the help of the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program (BTS Arts), which has relied on state funding and an endowment since its inception in 2008.
Although district test scores have not come out yet for the 2025-26 school year, Peters has already seen improvements at his school that deserve celebration. Chronic absenteeism is down from 55% to 38%, and kindergarten and second-grade classroom test scores both hit a five-year high.
Erin Huber is the BTS Arts teacher at Magna STEAM Academy. In her classroom, academic affirmations line one of the walls. Statements like “I can identify 3D shapes” and “I can name the 3 primary colors” hang above students’ heads as they create projects that combine art with geometry, biology, engineering and more.
To plan lessons, Huber coordinates with other core subject teachers at the school so the students can build on what they’re learning in each classroom.
“It’s just really, really growing, and they’re very excited to be at school,” Huber said. She echoed that attendance has been up and students are performing better on classroom tests.
To show off students’ progress and projects, the school also created Magna STEAM nights. Once a quarter, parents gather at the school to eat, spend time with neighbors and see what their kids have been working on.
Megan Olsen, a parent with two kids at Magna STEAM Academy, said community engagement has grown because of the new BTS Arts program.
“Last year, we’d be lucky to get 30, 40 people” at an event, she said. Now, Magna STEAM nights draw hundreds of parents to the school. “It’s so nice to have that in the community,” Olsen said.
Community is key
For Matt Killpack and Kyle Hoopes, the principals of Highland Elementary and Foothill Elementary, respectively, community is also a central theme to how they run their schools.
They said that in Alpine School District and Utah as a whole, teachers rely on each other to find out how they can best teach students.
“There’s a lot of commitment in our state to professional learning communities,” Killpack said.
He said those communities are made up of teams of teachers who analyze student data and teaching practices to figure out what’s working and what’s not. When one teacher’s methods work well, others can learn from and capitalize on them. And when students’ scores and comprehension aren’t looking good, teachers can reach out to other classes and even schools in the district to see what’s working for them.
“They get good at being vulnerable enough with each other to say, ‘Here’s my data. My kids scored at this level on this measure...You did really well; I didn’t do so well. How did you do that?’” Killpack said.
The two principals agreed, though, that end-of-year test scores are only one indicator of how a student is doing, and definitely not an indicator of their worth. What’s more important to them is that students feel loved, seen and important when they come to school.
“We want to help the kids feel like when they come to school, with whatever teacher that they receive, that it’s a safe place for them,” Hoopes said.
By cultivating that type of environment, these two agreed, kids will want to be there. And the best way to teach students — and in turn produce high test scores — is to empower them to want to learn and know that they can.
Why this matters
Utah is currently ranked the No. 1 state overall and No. 4 in the education category by U.S. News & World Report, and a new study from Stanford University, the Educational Opportunity Project, showed Utah was one of five states whose district test scores were above the U.S. average.
Clearly, many schools in Utah perform better than others across the country. But some, like Magna Elementary, need some improvement. The arts program is one approach to bolstering scores.
The Stanford study drew on information from the Education Data Center’s State Assessment Data Repository (SADR), which shows district test scores for grades 3-8 in all 50 states and D.C.
The project, published in May, contains scores from 2022 to 2025, forgoing 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19.
It’s designed to provide a practical way to compare elementary schools across the nation.
According to the researchers, an average test score represents how well a student in a school, district or county performed on a standardized test, and those scores reflect “the total set of educational opportunities children have had from birth through middle school.” They emphasized that experiences both in and out of school can affect how a student performs on a test.
These five elementary schools produced the highest average test scores in Utah, compared to the national average:
- Peruvian Park Elementary, Canyons School District
- Sunrise Elementary, Canyons School District
- Highland Elementary, Alpine School District
- Howard R. Driggs Elementary, Granite School District
- Foothill Elementary, Alpine School District
These five elementary schools had the lowest average test scores in Utah:
- Redwood Elementary, Granite School District
- Copperview Elementary, Canyons School District
- Magna Elementary, Granite School District
- Leadership Learning Academy - Ogden Campus
- Plymouth Elementary, Granite School District
You can click here to see how individual schools, districts or states ranked on the U.S. scale and the details of the calculation.