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South Salt Lake • Angela Rowland said she wasn't surprised by her school's SAGE scores.

As principal of Utah International Charter School, she got an early look at the numbers last spring. And she witnessed firsthand as her students struggled on the computer-adaptive assessment.

"You can tell when a kid is completely blown out of the water," she said. "One girl was crying."

Statewide, roughly four in 10 Utah students had scores considered proficient on SAGE last year, according to data released Monday by the state Office of Education.

It's an improvement over 2014, but little comfort to a school such as Utah International, where fewer than 4 percent of students met grade-level expectations in science, math and English.

Rowland said her school is effectively doomed to fail. The charter's students are primarily English language learners and refugees, who struggle with standardized tests.

She said she could recruit more affluent and English-speaking students to boost scores, but then the school would be failing its educational mission.

"We've had a few kids you wouldn't consider at-risk," she said. "They come for a year, kind of like study abroad."

Not every charter school is as challenged as Utah International, but the new test scores show that many struggle with SAGE.

Of the 99 charter schools included in the SAGE testing data released Monday, 42 earned proficiency rates below the state average, compared with 33 that bested the state's scores.

Two schools had incomplete testing data, and the remaining 22 charters were both above and below the state average, depending on individual test subjects.

No clear trend was apparent for which subject tripped up the 22 charters with mixed scores, but most of that group fell below the state average on two out of three tests.

At the individual school level, charter SAGE scores were among the best and worst in the state.

North Logan's InTech Collegiate High School earned proficiency rates between 75 percent and 80 percent.

The school is one of six early-college charter schools in the state, and principal Jason Stanger said there's an expectation that they outperform their district counterparts.

"If we're not, the public should be concerned that we're not doing our jobs," he said. "We want to be consistently providing unique results in the state."

But Stanger said that same better-or-bust mentality doesn't apply to every charter school.

He said the early-college high schools, by design, are meant to produce college-ready graduates. But different charters have different missions.

"I think some provide a unique niche where they're offering something that may not be able to be found in a neighborhood school," he said.

Opposite InTech Collegiate on the performance spectrum is Salt Lake City's Dual Immersion Academy, where 10 percent of students were proficient in math and science and 13 percent were proficient in English.

Director Angela Fanjul said she was disappointed in her scores, but added that poor performance on standardized tests is not limited to charter schools.

"Some district schools are falling below and some schools are falling above," she said.

School districts are required to accept all students and are overseen by elected school boards accountable to voters. Charters operate independently under unelected officials and are able to cap enrollment. If a charter school is unable to demonstrate success, why should taxpayers fund its operations?

Fanjul points to the parents who enroll their students at the alternative schools.

"I think giving students a choice is paramount and giving parents a choice is paramount," she said. "If they choose not to come to our school, then we wouldn't be here."

Recently, two charter schools were forced to shut down after coming under scrutiny by the Utah Charter School Board.

After placing the schools on probation last year, the board initiated the termination process in August, leading Wasatch Institute of Technology to voluntarily shut its doors.

The second school, Alianza Academy, intended to fight the board's decision and maintain operations. But parents spooked by the pending termination fled the charter, prompting Alianza officials to shut down three days into the new academic year.

Howard Headlee, chairman of the charter-school board, said the board is prepared to hold schools accountable for low performance.

But he added that it's unlikely a charter would be shut down based on SAGE scores.

"The SAGE test is still very new and very unreliable," he said. "I don't think we would make any decisions based on SAGE for at least a few years."

Headlee said the recent closures were a result of several factors, including budget and administrative issues in addition to low academic performance.

He said a charter could be closed solely based on test scores, but it would require clear data showing that students were being harmed or losing academic ground by enrolling there.

"The fact that [charters] are schools of choice and people are choosing them means a lot," he said.

Stanger said it's fair for the public to expect some return on their charter investment.

That doesn't mean every charter has to exceed the test scores of their nearest district school, he said. But charters should offer something to students and the community in order to justify their existence.

"The general idea of charter schools is that they should create a modest amount of competition in the education market," he said. "If they're not doing that, then we need not to scrap charter schools, but we need to have different charter schools or different people running charter schools."