Some question whether U-PASS upholds a high standard.

Salt Lake City Superintendent McKell Withers and Associate Superintendent Charles Hausman note it's clear U-PASS will report test scores broken down by ethnicity and poverty. But they also note documents haven't explicitly said it would hold schools accountable for groups' performance, or how.

"The high performance of high-performing subgroups lets you mask performance of low-performing subgroups," Hausman said. And in that, kids suffer.

Similar concerns are being voiced by ethnic minority advocates and national media, including a scathing New York Times editorial.

"As far as I know, U-PASS is not a fully designed system. . . , and in the past couple of months, has been characterized as a moving target . . . so that it's not clear what the effect of the U-PASS system would be," said Ross Wiener, policy director of The Education Trust, a group based in Washington, D.C., that advocates high academic achievement for all. "This is really a question of whether all students are going to count in accountability decisions."

State school bosses swear they will.

The state last month submitted a draft plan to use U-PASS to meet NCLB — an unconventional move the U.S. Department of Education OK'd amid an unconventional movement, Park said.

The draft was to be used for discussion and to educate the federal government on the U-PASS growth model, state Associate Superintendent Christine Kearl said. Utah's formal submission will come in another month or so.

The State Office of Education provided a copy of the draft, sans hypotheticals, to the Deseret Morning News, which requested it.

The draft repeatedly refers to subgroups, which Harrington says makes "abundantly clear" the state would include those groups in accountability determinations. It is, after all, a pitch for an accountability — not a reporting — plan.

"I wouldn't dream of not putting disaggregation in there," Harrington said, adding language could be made more explicit in the formal proposal. "Our most pernicious problem (is the) achievement gap."

The governor's education deputy, Tim Bridgewater, who has worked on state-federal negotiations, backs the statement.

Possible changes

Meanwhile, another part of the document will be yanked.

The document pitches holding schools accountable for groups of 40 students or more in each subgroup.

Utah currently requires a group size of 10, with an error margin to not identify schools based on a single test score.

But for schools with more than 800 students, the draft suggests group size equal to 5 percent of the school's average daily membership, up to 200.