Jill Underly, the top DPI official, finalized those changes Sept. 3. They will be applied to 2024-25 state report card data, which will be released in November.
“Just as you wouldn’t rely on a decade-old GPS to find your way today, we can’t use outdated performance benchmarks to guide school improvement,” Underly said in an Aug. 15 statement. “Students are learning in new, dynamic ways, and accountability systems must keep pace. Innovation in education means we transform how we measure success.”
Criticisms have continued past spring legislative session
As DPI finalizes changes from this summer, it continues to face criticism that it’s made three changes to cut scores since 2020.
Last spring, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would have forced DPI to revert Forward Exam cut scores to those in place in 2019-20. After the measure passed along party lines, Gov. Tony Evers ultimately vetoed the bill in March, saying that although he’s been critical of DPI’s approach, he took issue with lawmakers’ attempts to “undermine” the state agency’s independence and authority.
Among the most vocal critics to the changes is the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a law firm often aligned with conservative politics. It has released several statements, and analyses, that are critical of DPI.
This fall, a group of school board officials and current or former superintendents is trying a new approach: getting school boards to pass resolutions saying report card changes “make it impossible to meaningfully compare data from year to year.”
“Frequent and arbitrary changes are not only making it impossible for school leaders to understand and track school performance, the changes themselves are doing a disservice to students by cloaking lackluster academic performance data with other metrics,” reads a statement from the Wisconsin School Leaders for Excellence, which formed in January.
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