This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/dpi-fabricates-testing-miracle-but-doesnt-help-wisconsin-kids-read/

Lower standards set kids up for failure in college and workplaces

Quite the wonder this month when Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction released the latest results of state proficiency tests: Last year, only 37% of third-graders met the state standard for being able to read, a dismal performance little budged from previous years. But the 2023-24 figures showed a leap to 51% making the grade.

“Testing results show excellence,” said one Madison headline. “Half of Wisconsin students test proficient,” said one in Green Bay, while our state-owned radio network said “nearly half of students (are) at grade level.”

Ashwaubenon — to pick a district at random — might have been embarrassed last year that only 39% of its third-graders could read properly. Now, it’s 60%. In Madison, 45% of the third-graders are “meeting expectations” on literacy, so much nicer than 34% last year. Arcadia doubled, from 13% “proficient” last year to 26% now.

You asked for miracles, Wisconsin? I give you the DPI.

Except what really happened is that, when it comes to measuring students’ progress, the agency lowered the standards.

We were warned. The DPI in 2023 began resetting the state’s “cut scores,” or boundaries for categories such as “proficient” or “basic” on the Forward exam that measures students’ (and schools’) performance.

The process came to widespread attention when in June 2024 the DPI announced that it was shifting to more emollient labels such as “developing” instead of “below basic.” The change was easily understood and mocked. 

But the DPI changed more than labels.

Break with the past

For one thing, the agency changed the nature of questions on the reading test, in a way that makes scores not comparable to previous years. Some reports mention this, but more telling is that the online portal for seeing a school’s performance no longer will show a trend with the latest figures. Is that school doing better? The DPI can’t tell you and won’t try.

The other is where those boundaries between meeting the standard and missing it lie. The DPI’s thinking was laid bare earlier this month when the Institute for Reforming Government published the emails among top DPI leadership.

DPI leadership, including state Superintendent Jill Underly, thought the state’s standards were too high after they were aligned over a decade ago with the rigorous National Assessment of Educational Progress. “I hear that we have some of the highest cut scores nationally,” Underly wrote in one email. “I would like them to be looked at so that we aren’t judged negatively.”

The DPI’s leadership complained that the old “proficient” category was interpreted by the public as meaning a student was reading or doing math at grade level when it really meant something higher.

The IRG research chief, Quinton Klabon, points out the problem. “Grade level isn’t what colleges or employers are looking for,” he told me. It’s a minimum: “Every kid should be at grade level.” Wisconsin’s real standard should be, and was, something more like career- or college-ready.

You can see this on another test for which DPI changed its cut score. Wisconsin also gives students the ACT college test, the results figuring into districts’ report cards. The questions are set nationally and remain comparable. But Wisconsin sets its own lines for what score counts as “proficient.” It used to regard a math score of 22 as proficient. Now, meeting the standard means scoring only 19.

ACT predicts that about a third of kids scoring a 19 would get a D or F in college algebra.

Stakeholders

Perhaps we can think the bureaucrats are sincere. But the public had no input and the DPI didn’t match its new statistics with any drive to actually improve children’s skills. This comes off, all in all, as an effort to satisfy the insiders rather than stakeholders.

Such as school boards, for instance, who need an independent measure of a school’s change in performance to hold it accountable.

Voters in turn need such a measure to hold school boards accountable.

The parents of about 135,000 kids use some kind of school choice, whether public open enrollment, public charter or private schools. But how are parents to hold a school accountable if a key measure of its ability to teach has been altered?

Defending their changes, DPI officials contend that parents should look at a broader range of measures than proficiency percentages. That sounds like the holistic judging of a school’s safety or culture that parents often cite instead of test scores when opting for school choice — even as critics of choice deprecate parents’ ability to make such judgments. But the DPI shouldn’t make choosing still harder by fiddling with the stats.

Meanwhile, colleges haven’t necessarily changed the ACT score needed for admission nor eased up on basic algebra. The standards of workplaces haven’t been correspondingly lowered. When high school graduates find out the rest of life hasn’t lowered the bar for “proficiency,” when they find out they’ve been misled, it will be a cruel slap of reality.

As Klabon put it, “DPI’s feelings are less important than a kid feeling that they’re succeeding in college or the workplace.”

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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