By LANCE BANDLEY
lance@newsroom.byu.edu
Utah teachers and legislators are in a never-ending battle over a money and student testing. Legislators want teachers to be more accountable. Teachers want adequate supplies in the classroom and parents to be held more accountable.
This past year the Utah Legislature proposed a new way of testing and evaluating Utah students and education called the Utah Student Performance Assessment System. It is designed to test Utah students on what they are learning in the classroom.
The Utah legislature is taking five years to implement this new program, with one year gone.
Scores from the tests would give each school a 'grade.' The grade then rates the school to see if teachers are doing enough.
The schools have four more years of preparation and three to start evaluating schools and teachers before they will receive their first grades. By the time the grades will be released, it will be 2006.
Legislator Tammy Rowan, co-chair on the Learning Standards and Accountability in Education task force, is pushing for teacher accountability.
'We're trying to decide the best way to say as a school or school district if they're performing as well as they should be. Our goal is to improve student learning at all levels,' Rowan said.
Rowan wants teachers to be evaluated on students' test scores. She said the tests will be based on the state curriculum and will be an accurate measurement of student and teacher improvement.
However, Utah teachers see the new program as an invasion of the classroom by the state. Suzanne Clawson, a sixth grade teacher at Northridge Elementary in Orem, said students should be evaluated on many levels not just a single test.
'There are so many students who do well in school but do not test well,' Clawson said. 'We need to look at other accomplishments of students in the classroom.'
Teachers also are concerned because under the new program student scores will effect their pay. Schools scoring high will receive more money while school scoring poorly will receive less money. Teachers said this is unfair.
'We all need to be accountable, but to measure a teacher's salary by a test is wrong,' Clawson said.
Teachers said there are more factors that lead to the students' scores receive. The director of research and evaluation at Alpine School District, Frank Cameron, said 80 percent of test scores are attributed to four factors that schools have absolutely no control over. The four factors are: how many parents are at home; parents' incomes; the education of parents; and the location of the home.
Cameron said students whose parents make less than $18,000 a year score five points lower, on average, on the ACT than do students whose parents make more than $100,000 annually.
'The important thing to remember is that these are only averages,' Cameron said. 'Just because a student's parents have a low income doesn't automatically determine the student to score poorly.'
Cameron said holding teachers salaries to student scores would only end up hurting students.
'I guarantee increased scores, it happens everywhere, that doesn't mean increased learning,' he said.
Rowan said teachers are misunderstanding the new plan for education and are not being attacked by the state.
'I don't know where the word got out,' she said. 'It is not meant to punish teachers. It's not meant to say you're not doing a good job, and we're going to make you do your job.'
Rowan said education is the No. 1 priority for the legislative session this year. However, one problem facing the legislature is money. She said it doesn't have any extra funds to give to education.
She said the state may borrow, raise taxes, or shift money from other budgets to try and cover education.