Policy Update: Utah: Of Time and Money

Vital Statistics
40	Public school districts
742	Public schools
479,000	K-12 enrollment
10.6%	Minority students
10%	Children in poverty
11.2%	Students with disabilities
$1.9 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

Junior and senior high schools would add 45 to 60 minutes a day, which would help students complete an additional six required academic classes to go along with the current 24 course requirements needed for a high school diploma.

Bean's plan also calls for offering high school graduation credit for some courses students take in junior high school, special summer institutes for accelerated classes, and more professional development for teachers. He has proposed requiring as many as 10 career-ladder days for professional development for teachers.

That part of the proposal, as well as the overall cost of the plan, has some observers in the state wary.

"We're just not sure," says Jim Eldredge, the director of government relations for the Utah Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. "What he's trying to do is commendable, but the price tag is kind of hefty."

"This isn't anything terrifically new, but it would increase the requirements we have for our students," he says. The superintendent's proposal would require approval and funding from the legislature.

Utah has never sought to be in the vanguard of education reform. The state has been too busy in recent years trying to find the money to keep up with its rapid growth in student enrollment.

Last year, after years of steady increases, enrollment in public schools fell for the first time ever in the state, albeit only slightly, by about 1,000 students. Meanwhile, the healthy economy allowed the legislature to increase basic per-pupil funding and allocate money specifically to reduce class sizes in the middle grades.

Utah joined the charter school movement last year, but only on a pilot basis that will allow for just eight such independent public schools at first.

For the second year in a row, state lawmakers in 1998 toyed with the idea of a tuition tax credit for parents enrolling their children in private schools.

The plan by Sen. Howard A. Stephenson, a Republican, called for granting state income-tax credits of up to $1,900 per child for parents who pull their children out of public school for private school.

Stephenson argued that public schools would benefit because they would get to keep about $1,900 in local property taxes for students who pulled out, but they would not have to pay to educate them.

While Utah educators say they aren't satisfied with current achievement levels, their students measure up pretty well, especially considering that the state traditionally ranks at or near the bottom in per-pupil spending.

On the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, which the state administers in the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades, Utah students performed better than the national norm in every subject except elementary language and reading.

"We have historically had somewhat low levels of performance in language arts, but otherwise we had excellent performance," says Barbara Lawrence, the coordinator of evaluation and assessment for the state office of education.

The state adopted a core curriculum in the 1980s. The subject-area standards are updated on a rotating basis, Lawrence says. The state does not have any mandatory, high-stakes accountability tests.

One new area of assessment affects the state's youngest schoolchildren. Under a program mandated by the legislature in 1996, all entering kindergartners took a reading and math assessment for the first time last fall.

Lawrence stresses that the test is not meant to screen students or place them in any way.

"It is designed to help teachers tailor their instruction," she says. "It is to ensure that students get the literacy foundation they need to be able to learn to read."

Utah's public school kindergarten teachers spent about the first two weeks of school testing 35,000 entering pupils and then meeting with their parents to discuss the results. Some education experts have questioned the testing of students at such a young age, and the legislature declined to allocate about $100,000 that was requested by the state education office to train teachers to give the assessment. But the tests went ahead anyway.