What’s behind the dispute over test scores in Wisconsin schools?

Conservatives accuse the state superintendent of lowering the bar for student performance, while educators say public schools are being set up for failure by a chronic lack of support from the Legislature.

Proficient. Advanced. Developing. Below basic. What’s in a label? 

It depends on how one views the way changes were made to standardized testing results in Wisconsin schools last year. But public education advocates say the last 15 years of fights about the standards — involving a carousel of different tests — is diverting attention from the real school crisis: a chronic lack of support since Republicans took control of the Legislature in 2011.

The current debate about test scores has become a central topic in the campaign for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction. Voters will decide in a February 18 primary which two of the three candidates will advance to the April 1 general election. The incumbent, Dr. Jill Underly, led an effort to make changes in 2024 that she says are more realistic about assessing current student performance, while her two challengers and GOP lawmakers accuse her of lowering the bar to pad her record or handling the situation poorly.

New Tests, New Scoring

State leaders can choose to align their standardized tests to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but they can also make modifications. Underly said recent changes were necessary for the Forward Exam, administered every spring, and the process to move away from the NAEP yardstick was transparent.

“We get educators to come in and look at the test,” Underly said Tuesday on UpNorthNews Radio. “They make recommendations for new standards to add to the test and old standards to take out. Kids are learning things today that are more challenging than when we were in school. I think any parent who has helped their kids with their homework understands what I’m saying. And so [educators] make recommendations to adjust the scoring scale because now you’re scoring different items.”

Under the NAEP standard, there were four labels depending on how students’ scored — “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” and “below basic” — with the bands divided at a particular test score, also known as a cut score. Under the revised Forward Exam, with its updated questions, the labels became “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching” and “developing,” and the cut scores were adjusted, as well.

Critics say the changes were less about making the test more suitable to where Wisconsin students are right now and more about lowering the bar of expectations in order to make student achievement appear higher than it would be seen state-by-state.

Both of Underly’s challengers in the primary election raised concerns about the issue.

“Lowering standards deprives our kids of the opportunity to be college- or career-ready, and that is unacceptable in Wisconsin,” said a statement from charter schools advocate Brittany Kinser. “Our kids deserve more, not less.”

“The timing was terrible,” said Sauk Prairie superintendent Jeff Wright on Wednesday’s UpNorthNews Radio show. “We are just coming out of the pandemic. Schools need to know year after year whether the interventions we put into place to help kids address learning loss were working. And just as we were getting to the three-year finish line to see if we made progress, to have the finish line change was really hard for schools, for teachers, and for families to know whether or not their child had fully recovered from the pandemic.”

Gov. Tony Evers, who served as state superintendent for 10 years prior to his election as governor, told reporters he felt the change “could have been handled better.”

Underly believes her critics are making apples to oranges comparisons.

“I guess what it comes down to,” she said, “is that if this wasn’t a political year, my feeling is this wouldn’t be an issue.”

Some Republican legislators are circulating a bill that would force the Department of Public Instruction to revert to the NAEP standards.

Missing the Point on Legislative Neglect

Wherever the bar is set by legislators, Underly and other education advocates believe too many are people are missing the point: Years of financial neglect by the Legislature makes it increasingly difficult for schools to keep up, much less perform better, on standardized tests.

“Essentially, the story is there’s a long history of setting the bar, but forgetting about the most important part, which is how are we going to help kids get there?” said Chris Thiel, legislative specialist for Milwaukee Public Schools, on Monday’s UpNorthNews Radio. 

In fact, heading into this 15th year of Republican dominance of the Legislature, state aid for schools has never kept up with annual inflation, even as GOP funding for voucher schools has exploded.

“We’ve seen a long history of people who have advocated voucher policy also fighting against private schools having to take similar assessments,” Thiel said. “If these standards are going to be put out there for public schools, doesn’t it make sense that these same standards should be put out there for private schools that are receiving public money?” 

“The critics or the Republicans in the Legislature would rather focus on this and instead not talk about the fact that they’ve been underfunding our schools for the past 15 years,” Underly said. “And if they would invest in public schools, we would see kids doing a lot better.”

Historical Context: A Carousel of Standards

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act that called for nearly all students in the United States to be at 100% proficiency for their grade level in subjects like English and math by the 2013-14 school year. An initiative called Common Core was designed to help each state set and attain those higher standards. When it was launched in Wisconsin in 2010, it was welcomed by Republicans, including then-Gov. Scott Walker, as well as Democrats like Evers, then the state superintendent. 

But far-right conservatives, taking note that Common Core was also being embraced by President Barack Obama and funded in large part by Bill and Melinda Gates, began spreading misinformation that claimed the program was an “Orwellian” big-government overreach with “one-size-fits-all” curricula and government computers tracking students’ personal data. 

There were also some critics among educators who the process was being rushed—but more importantly, didn’t include the resources to raise the bar to 100% proficiency. 

At the time, Thiel said, the federal government was promising to give school districts a 40% reimbursement of the cost of providing special education services, “but they were really given 11 or 12%. And they said, we’re going to help kids in poverty with a program called Title I.”

The situation then got worse, Thiel said, when Walker and a Republican-controlled Assembly and Senate came into power.

The standardized testing guidelines were formally changed for the 2011 state achievement test and as a result, the percentage of public school students labeled as proficient or advanced in reading and math plunged from 80% to under 50%.

“You would think, ‘okay, we’re going to raise the bar. Let’s have all our kids be successful at this higher level,’ then you would then increase funding for students to get them there,” Thiel said. “But in 2011, as you know, we actually cut funding. So we raised the bar, but cut the funding, and that obviously just doesn’t make any sense. And so here we are again, 15 years on talking about where the bar is going to be set, when the major part of the conversation needs to be: ‘Okay, but are we going to give our kids the choices to get them to where we want them to be?’”

Thiel compares the whole debate to promising to feed your children three meals a day, but only budgeting enough to buy groceries for one.

“If you’re not going to fund it, you know, what does it really mean? I think we want high standards for our kids. But if we want those high standards as the responsible adults, we are obligated to provide our kids the resources to get them there.”