A Question of Standards

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has never been the most unpredictable man in the world—in each speech one can expect a few “by gollys” and references to pickleball—but on the first day of this year’s legislative session, he delivered a shocker when asked about State Superintendent Jilly Underly’s decision to change K-12 testing standards.

“I hate to even talk about things that aren't my purview anymore in the Department of Public Instruction, but I just think there should have been some information and dialogue happening with all sorts of people before that decision," he said in a news conference earlier this month. “It's hard to compare year to year if one year you're doing something completely different.”

In August, Underly’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced changes to Wisconsin’s Forward Exam that renamed each level of achievement and made it much easier to attain each level. The standards, which appear on DPI’s school and district annual report cards, were for decades labeled as “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” and “below basic.”

Those were changed to “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching,” and “developing,” which appear designed to sound better to parents and legislators concerned about student performance. They would naturally react more strongly to a student who is “below basic” than to one who is “developing.”

This change alone would have relatively innocuous, but it was paired with a complete overhaul of the benchmark scores needed to reach each level. For instance, previous scores ranged from 517 to 611 in third grade math. The new standards have a range of 1,370 and 1,740, making comparisons to prior years impossible.

It is also impossible to compare Wisconsin students’ performance to that of students in other states because the Forward Exam no longer aligns with the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

This is almost certainly by design, as the changes also mean it is much easier for students to attain each level of achievement under the new scoring system.

“There wasn’t enough conversation with stakeholders [and] parents ahead of time,” Evers said while lamenting Underly’s sudden change. “I think it could have been handled better.”

Underly, though, doesn’t see a problem.

“We have high standards in Wisconsin, and that will continue. But aligning our benchmarks with the standards has been a top priority coming out of the pandemic era, because kids do best when there is clear information shared between parents and teachers,” she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Our updated standards more clearly lay out learning expectations, and detaching the cut scores from NAEP better demonstrates our results. I strongly stand by the decision to make this system better for the long haul.”

She said much the same thing the last time her DPI made a major to standards. In 2021, baseline scores were changed on annual report cards to make it easier for schools and school districts to achieve passing grades.

On the annual DPI report cards, schools and districts are given one of the following designations: “Significantly exceeds expectations,” “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” “meets few expectations,” or “fails.”

When DPI changed its standards, it kept the minimum score needed to achieve a “significantly exceeds expectations” designation the same but lowered every other one. The range for “exceeds expectations” dropped from 73-82.9 to 70-82.9, “meets expectations” was lowered from 63-72.9 to 58-69.9, “meets few expectations” moved from 53-62.9 to 48-57.9, and fails dropped all the way from below 52.9 to below 47.9.

Even though test scores dramatically declined in the 2020-2021 school year (which of course was blamed on COVID-19 and not the decision to keep schools closed far longer than they needed to be), DPI handed out the same number of passing grades as in the 2018-2019 school year.

The only conceivable reason for this was DPI’s lowered standards. Evers was silent then but today seems bothered by Underly’s latest attempt at covering up failures to make the educational bureaucracy look better. If he is sincere in his stated opposition to these changes, then he will sign a Republican bill undoing them.

After all, as he frequently asserts, it’s for our kids.