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Forward Exam Scores Show Lackluster Learning
There’s more bad news for Wisconsin school kids.
The Department of Public Instruction on Monday released the scores from several years of the state’s Forward Exam, which is the state test taken mostly by kids in elementary school and junior high.
"The Forward Exam, revised extensively and administered during the 2023-24 school year, was updated to align with newer, revised Wisconsin Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics," DPI said in its announcement. "Given the differences between the previous and updated Forward Exam ELA and mathematics assessments, the trend data should be interpreted with caution."
DPI’s release includes hundreds of pages of school-by-school test results, but it does not include any overall numbers. Parents would need to look for their kids’ school, broken down by year, and then look to compare those scores with earlier years.
Will Flanders, an education expert for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said any parents who do that will see the Wisconsin school kids continue to fall behind.
“To the surprise of no one, [the test scores] reveal that student proficiency is still down since the COVID 19 pandemic. Proficiency is about 3.61% lower in third grade reading statewide than the 2018-19 school year,” Flanders wrote on Twitter.
He also said the test scores show the DPI lowered the bar for kids.
“DPI still claims they didn't lower the standards, but this data release proves that to be a lie. It's time we stopped allowing DPI to lie to us on the continuing failures of our public schools,” Flanders added. “For some reason after the election, DPI has released data on what proficiency would have looked like if the new standards were applied to previous years of data.”
The last set of test scores, the Nation’s Report Card scores, also showed that Wisconsin school kids have not yet come back from the COVID learning loss, and are doing worse in reading and math.
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