Utah's score for standards and accountability also falls just below the national average and according to the report shows room for improvement in assessments and school accountability.

That is, the state tests rely too heavily on multiple-choice questions.

"They don't like us doing as much with multiple-choice questions but when you are resource-starved, as Utah is, that is how testing is going to get done," said Mark Peterson, spokesman for the State Office of Education.

He said with multiple-choice questions students fill in the bubbles and then they are graded by running the tests through a computer. Anything else would take more time and more money.

"If you start writing essays and short answers then you need to bring in a bunch of readers — which we are doing and that's what the writing assessment is all about — but for language arts, math and science, for those areas it's bubbling."

Still, Utah ranks near the top of the nation in terms of resource equity. Its wealth-neutrality score shows that poorer districts tend to have higher per-pupil funding levels than wealthier districts, a pattern found in only 10 states.

Quality Counts 2006 was conducted by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

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E-mail: terickson@desnews.com