Isral DeBruin:This week, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) unveiled yet another change to how “proficiency” is measured on the state’s Forward exams. This change, not the first in recent years, makes it difficult to tell whether school districts are doing good work and hold them accountable: long-term trend lines can’t be constructed when the targets keep changing.
Worse, these specific changes seem designed to goose performance numbers—not because of sudden, dramatic improvement all across the state, but just by classifying things differently. DPI discarded the old categories of “Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced” and are now using “Developing, Approaching , Meeting, Advanced.” Apart from being less obvious to the user what these terms mean, introducing new terms gives them the excuse to redefine the boundaries for what falls into which category.
The results are shameless. For each school district, we tally what percent of students are “Proficient,” i.e. were graded in either the “Meeting” or the “Advanced” bucket for this year, and compared those percentages to the same statistic (the percentage of students districtwide graded in either “Proficient” or “Advanced”) from last year.
Districts on average boosted their Math proficiency statistic by 14.0 percentage points. The average district’s Math proficiency moved from 44% to 57%, with the crucial result that a majority are now proficient rather than failing proficiency. Meanwhile, the English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency numbers moved by almost as much, 13.2 points on average. Once again, the average district saw this proficiency rate cross the majority threshold, from 42% to 54%.
This really crystalizes the impact of WI’s new, lower standards: Someone could graduate high school “meeting” the new standards but not actually be ready for college.
And they wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it.
Gaming the System: Wisconsin’s Forward Exam Scores Now Useless.
“These (Wisconsin DPI) revisions are a way to make post-pandemic school performance look better just by lowering standards, without improving student outcomes”
More.
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Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let’s go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard.
This first one’s a doozy: