schoolinfosystem.org
Cory Brewer and Dan Lennington: This civil rights law protects all students from discrimination based on race. But Underly is determined instead to push racially divisive “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies, and to blame the Trump administration for “dictating” education policy. But this isn’t some novel federal overreach — it’s longstanding federal law. The U.S. […]
Matthew Yglesias: Democrats often seem reluctant to propose ideas that teachers’ unions don’t like, because they want their support (or at least non-hostility) in a primary. But I’m pretty sure the NJEA is going to back Spiller no matter what Sherrill or Gottheimer or Fulop say, so why not be bolder? Democrats could use fresh […]
Limited background amidst Wisconsin (and Madison’s) long term, disastrous reading results: Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story). Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading (FORT). Perhaps this forensic thread offers a […]
Corrinne Hess Schools that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s directive about diversity, equity, and inclusion may be at risk of losing Title I funding. This school year, Wisconsin received about $216 million in Title I funds. About $82 million of that money went to Milwaukee Public Schools. Underly said the request from the […]
Karen Vaites: Last year, I wrote about a specific, promising development in Wisconsin: the state published the strongest ELA curriculum list in the country. Unfortunately, the work in Wisconsin prior to that development, and since, underwhelms. I’m overdue to write about the broader context in Wisconsin, mostly because progress on curriculum improvement has stalled, and I should […]
IFRG: New public recordsreleased Thursday by the Institute for Reforming Government’s (IRG) Center for Investigative Oversight reveal how the Department of Public Instruction’s lenient enforcement of Milwaukee Public Schools’ 2024 finance deadlines set up different, more destructive outcomes than DPI’s stricter enforcement in previous years. Superintendent Underly’s DPI released the records March 5, 2025, 8 months after IRG’s June […]
WisPolitics email summary: The record spending in Wisconsin’s state schools superintendent race between education consultant Brittany Kinser and incumbent Jill Underly has now hit $4.5 million. Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.
Capital Times Editorial:a In contrast, Underly is backed by the state’s most ardent advocates for public-school students and teachers. Many of her backers are Democratic legislators, and she’s supported by the party. But, more importantly, she’s supported by educators who work in the state’s urban and rural schools, technical colleges and universities. American Federation of […]
John Nichols summary The contest pits two people with very different views against one another. Underly — who taught in rural schools before becoming an elementary school principal, school district superintendent, university academic advisor and administrator, and assistant director at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction — was elected to serve as superintendent in 2021. […]
Corrinne Hess: She wants to make it easier for failing schools to somehow seem like they’re succeeding,” Vos said during a press conference. “I hope that’s one of the areas that we’ll get some speedy discussion on, hopefully bipartisan support. Because I would hope that no one, the most liberal person or the most conservative […]
Emilee Fannon: Are standards lower? DPI officials have defended the new benchmarks, saying they align more directly with the state’s Forward Exam and teaching standards. Underly noted other states, such as Oklahoma and New York, have recently lowered their testing benchmarks. However, the Institute for Reforming Government, a conservative think tank, points to changes for […]
Dave Cieslewicz And the racial achievement gap in Madison was far worse than the rest of the state. Statewide the gaps were 43% for English and 50% for math. About 60% of white students were proficient in English compared to 17% of Black students. About 64% of white students were proficient or better in math […]
Kayla Huynh Among the changes are lower scoring standards for each performance level and different labels categorizing students. In an interview with CBS 58, state Superintendent Jill Underly said students “appeared to be doing worse than they really were” under the previous system. Madison Metropolitan School District leaders this month offered the School Board a sneak […]
WisPolitics: Underly road a historic wave of cashflow to win in 2021, marking a significant win for Dems of the GOP. While the race was officially nonpartisan, the Dem Party contributed $949,844 to Underly’s campaign, which spent $1.53 million over the election. In all, candidates and outside groups spent $3 million on the race, a […]
Scott Girard: It’s been a challenging few years for K-12 education, both locally and nationally. Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly is nonetheless “optimistic” about what’s ahead for the field. “I think people are coming together, realizing that if we want to improve the lives of all Wisconsinites and especially the kids who are going to […]
Dylan Pahman and Alexander William Salter: It would be one thing if inflation were unforeseeable, but it isn’t. The Federal Reserve flooded the market with money for years and supported the market for government debt. Politicians ran record deficits as the Fed happily purchased bonds. The result was an unprecedented money-supply increase, to almost $22 […]
Parents defending education: New documents released in a federal lawsuit filed by parents alleging anti-Asian discrimination case against the school board in Fairfax County, Va., reveal that board members knew that the new admissions policies to America’s No. 1 high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, were “racist,” “anti asian” and “political.” […]
Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt: Moving the goal line on scores doesn’t change the sorry outcomes Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt and the Chairman of Assembly Committee on Education released the following statement on the results of the 2019-20 District and School Report Cards released by the Department of Public Instruction on Nov. 16:“Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly and […]
Molly Beck: One of the most influential lawmakers over the state budgeting process said he wouldn’t support increasing funding for the state education agency because its new leader elected Tuesday was heavily backed by Democrats and teachers unions. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, made the statement just an hour after Pecatonica School District Superintendent Jill […]
Transcript [Machine Generated PDF]: Deborah Kerr: [00:43:53] Um, whose turn is it to go first? Okay. That’s fine. Yeah, we’re pretty good at figuring this out. Um, [00:44:00] so that’s one thing we can do. Um, yes, I support the FORT. I fo I support the Praxis test. So you gotta think about something. Why […]
Wisconsin Democracy: Liberal groups are winning the money race in the so-called “nonpartisan” state school superintendent race, where Pecatonica Area School Superintendent Jill Underly faces Deborah Kerr, a retired Brown Deer schools superintendent. Three groups that generally back Democratic candidates in partisan elections – A Better Wisconsin Together, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin – […]
Daniel Bice: No one has been a bigger promoter of public schools during the race for state school superintendent than Jill Underly. That was, no doubt, a large part of the reason that Underly, the Pecatonica school superintendent, has won the endorsement of state and local teachers unions. But back when it was her decision to […]
Chris Rickert: A group of 32 education officials is set to work with the New Hampshire-based Center for Assessment on updating the report card metrics. Underly would have the final say on approving them. ——- Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?
Will Flanders Last yr, DPI met behind closed doors to lower the standards for the Forward Exam. Now, they will apparently do the same thing for the state report card. We need transparency in these meetings. Why are these standard settings that effect all WI families held behind closed doors? —— Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin […]
Samantha Smylie The Illinois State Board of Education agreed Wednesday to move ahead with a process to change the state’s testing system, though the exact details still are being worked out. That process will include creating new “cut scores,” or the lowest score needed for a student to be sorted into broad categories of achievement […]
Alex Tabarrok: In 2022, I highlighted Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff’s proposal that young people should borrow to invest in the stock market. Why? Most people invest gradually, which leads to a concentration of stock holdings late in life. By borrowing early, young investors can spread market risk more evenly across their lifetime, much like diversifying across assets. […]
Kyla Scanlon This is a misalignment problem. The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with […]
Mike Dowd But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless. In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted “equity grading” practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students. But […]
Corrine Hess: This year, that money has been used to increase the recruitment, retention, and diversification of school counselors, school psychologists and school social workers. DPI learned Tuesday the grant would be canceled. At this time, DPI believes the state will still be able to access the initial funding of $2 million through Dec. 31, […]
Will Flanders Last year, (taxpayer funded Wisconsin) DPI changed Forward Exam standards-lowering the bar for proficiency in WI. Curiously after the election, DPI released data that “unrigs” the results to show what trends would have been. We put that data into district-by-district graph. 🧵 —- 14% reading proficiency in Beloit on the Forward Exam turned […]
Will Flanders 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. —— Quinton Klabon: DPI uploaded scores in the least usable way possible, so I did it for […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has issued a warning to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and its Superintendent, Jill Underly, to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or potentially lose federal funding. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has set a deadline for Thursday, April […]
Andrew Waugh The government says it’s going to lower provincial assessment targets in New Brunswick schools because it deflates everyone involved when they aren’t hit. Article content The current target is for 90 per cent of students to “achieve appropriate or higher levels on provincial language, mathematical and scientific literacies on provincial assessments at the […]
Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David: Machine learning is one of the fastest growing areas of computer science, with far-reaching applications. The aim of this textbook is to introduce machine learning, and the algorithmic paradigms it offers, in a principled way. The book provides an extensive theoretical account of the fundamental ideas underlying machine learning and […]
Chris Rickert: The U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Both DPI and the Madison School District offer various programs and resources in the DEI field, although whether any of them would violate the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal nondiscrimination law is unclear. Among the resources offered by DPI […]
Dr. Eric Ostermeier In 1909, Superintendent Charles Cary was elected to his third of five terms with a 35.6 percent plurality victory, defeating rural school inspector LaFrance Wood of Nielsville by 4.5 points in a four-candidate field. The subsequent 28 elections for the office had been decided by an average of 31.2 points prior to […]
Jessica Grose: Florida would join Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska in lowering their testing standards or graduation requirements of late. After the absolutely dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 2024, which showed that a higher percentage of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading than at any point in the test’s 30-year history, you would […]
Corrinne Hess: Underly received about $850,000 from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, out of the $1.1 million she’s raised since February. Kinser received almost $1.7 million from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, out of about $2.2 million raised total, according to her committee report and a late filing. Kinser, who has never been elected to public office, […]
Dave Cieslewicz: Some of my liberal friends have expressed their unhappiness over my endorsement of Brittany Kinser for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. So, let me expand on my reasons. When I was at the city of Madison and there was a managerial opening I always first thought about how that department was functioning. If […]
Karen Vaites: I have made one more update to my State Curriculum Map tracker. While @WisconsinDPI stopped maintaining the website with 2021 curriculum data by district, parents retained the info, so have been able to publish it openly. Link added. Note that parents are also the only source of 2024-25 curriculum data by district in […]
www: WisPolitics summary: Co-author Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, said the standards give parents a false impression of how their kids are doing in school. He also said it’s a problem that data can’t be compared year-to-year, which is problematic considering learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said the state should go back to the […]
Dairyland Sentinel: Sixty-four days have passed since the Dairyland Sentinel filed an open records request with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and State Superintendent, Dr Jill Underly. Underly and the Department have yet to hand over the records, despite the legal requirement to do so. The request, submitted Jan. 21, seeks details on controversial changes […]
Dave Cieslewicz: “We’re voting for Kinser as much as we’re voting against incumbent Jill Underly. Underly is underwhelming. In our view, she rigged state test scores just before the election to make her record look better. Even Gov. Tony Evers, who once held her job, disagreed with her. Then she further eroded her credibility by submitting a […]
WisPolitics: Ahead of the forum, Kinser and Republicans have repeatedly attacked Underly for changing the educational assessment standards, charging the incumbent lowered the standards which leads to misrepresentation of how students are doing. The GOP-run Legislature passed a bill to reject the Underly change. It’s now before Gov. Tony Evers. Underly has defended the change, […]
Molly Beck: The move could deliver a blow to Democratic State Superintendent Jill Underly ahead of the April 1 spring election, when Underly is up for reelection against education consultant Brittany Kinser. Lawmakers passed a bill 18-14 that requires the DPI to overhaul its state report cards to match how they measured academic achievement before […]
WILL: Additional Background: Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, DPI made several changes to Wisconsin’s academic accountability system that have made it less rigorous. These changes were made unilaterally by the Department without any input from the legislature or Governor. These changes included: Earlier this year, WILL endorsed Assembly Bill 1, introduced by Senator John Jagler […]
Jonaki Mehta: There was one exception: Louisiana. In 2019, Louisiana’s fourth graders ranked 50th in the country for reading. Now, they’ve risen to 16th. According to an even more granular analysis, Louisiana is the only state that has not only made a “full recovery” from the pandemic in both math and reading, but has improved upon […]
Lucas Robinson: At last Monday’s School Board meeting, Madison Teachers Inc. President Michael Jones called the referendums a “bait and switch.” “I should have known better than to trust a district that spent the equivalent of multiple educators’ annual salary on school logos and rebranding that no one asked for,” Jones told the board, referring […]
Vince Bielski Tennessee is just one of the states where the College Board, a nonprofit with $1 billion in annual revenue, is trying to stop the expansion of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), run by a small company with about $10 million in revenue. While the College Board justifies its attack with criticism of the […]
Dissident Teacher Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw your kid reading to prepare for the next day’s lessons at school? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’m sorry. California schools are required by law to make all required texts available to all students in class and at home. Textbooks are pre-loaded onto iPads […]
Angie Schmitt: In fact, this data flies in the face of key Democratic/Progressive talking points on education, which appear to be bordering on flat-earth-level wrong. For example: Claim #1: More money will fix everything!!! Normie Democrats have been insisting that more money would fix everything in education since forever. If ONLY the MEAN Republicans would […]
Joshua Dunn For several decades, the high priestess of the balanced literacy movement has been Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, who directed the now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins once estimated that her Units of Study reading curriculum had been adopted by as many as one in four U.S. elementary schools. Irene Fountas […]
Kayla Huynh The new benchmarks are lower than the NAEP-aligned scores, which Underly has said are “an extremely high standard to meet, beyond grade-level knowledge.” McCarthy said educators requested the change and 100 teachers consulted with the department about the new system as part of a routine effort to update standards. “That’s the right approach,” McCarthy said. […]
MU Law Poll In the election for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 61% lack an opinion of incumbent Jill Underly and 69% haven’t heard enough about her opponent, Brittany Kinser. #mulawpoll —— and In 2013, slightly more people were concerned with property taxes than with school funding. In 2015 through 2018, a substantial majority was […]
Dan Shafer: In the upcoming Spring Election, the highest-profile race is the one for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the latest in Wisconsin’s seemingly endless number of everything-on-the-line elections. The undercard, then, is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Elections for this ostensibly nonpartisan office have not always attracted much attention, but this year’s race might buck […]
Quinton Klabon summary NEW DPI 2023 TEACHER REPORT —— Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test
Anna Hansen: Now that Southside Elementary has its long-awaited new name, the Madison School District is eyeing its next re-christenings. While district officials draft the necessary paperwork and place their orders for the new Lori Mann Carey Elementary signage, Conrad A. Elvehjem and Charles Lindbergh Elementary Schools are on deck for renaming during the 2025-2026 […]
Kayla Huynh But Wisconsin students remain behind years after the public health emergency disrupted learning, according to a national study on academic recovery this month. The average Wisconsin student is over a third of a grade level behind in math and half of a grade level behind in reading compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to results […]
Kayla Huynh: The McKenzie Foundation and the Boys & Girls Club will instead develop workforce programs for the school district “that combine academic rigor and workforce development,” McKenzie said in the statement. “By leveraging each organization’s unique strengths and resources, we can better serve students and provide them with the skills they need to succeed,” […]
Cathy Kozlowicz: The bill recognizes same-sex marriage by making references in the statutes to spouses gender-neutral. The terms “wife,” “mother,” “father” and “husband” were replaced with gender-neutral terms, such as spouse and person. In one section covering artificial insemination, “the husband of the mother” was changed to “the spouse of the inseminated person.” RGA Executive […]
Teo summary China deploys R1 to comprehensively automate their governance. This is probably a bit of a bigger deal than DOGE fights in salt mines. @layer07_yuxi explains that a lot of compute capacity was locked in 1K A100s-level datacenters, useless for training. All that comes online now. —— Where did the DeepSeek team attend university? […]
Patrick J. Bayer (Duke University – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)) Peter Q.. Blair (Harvard University – Harvard Graduate School of Education), Kenneth Whaley (University of South Florida): Tyler Cowen: I remain happy to provoke my readers: The United States ranks low among peer countries on the ratio of teacher spending […]
Dave Cieslewicz: If you ever wonder what people mean when they use the phrase “word salad”, here’s what they mean: “There is a predatory dynamic of coming into a district like ours and saying that you are going to resolve something as deep-rooted as racialized inequity through a school that pairs young people with professional […]
Abbey Machtig: “I do think that there is a fundamental misalignment in terms of how the school would fit into our more broad district plans and misunderstanding of services that we already provide,” board member Savion Castro said Wednesday. It’s a familiar approach, given the district has fought other proposed charter schools in the past. Documents show […]
Kate Martin, Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford Education journalist Karin Chenoweth visited one of Steubenville’s elementary schools back in 2008 and marveled at the results, which she wrote about in her book “How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools.” “It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” Chenoweth said in an interview. “They […]
Wispolitics: AB 1 would reverse changes to state testing standards made under Superintendent Jill Underly. Opponents have argued Underly lowered the standards, making it harder to gauge how students are doing. Up for reelection, she has rejected those claims. She says the changes actually provide a better picture of student achievement and were made through […]
Abbey Machtig: “If we have our own standards aligned to nobody else’s, guess what: We can fool ourselves into thinking that we are great, because we have no ability to compare ourselves to anybody else,” he said. The bill would require DPI to align scoring methods for the language arts and math sections of the […]
Andy Pierotti: – A pending lawsuit claims a publishing giant sold defective instructional material to school districts for decades, allegedly hurting children’s ability to read. An Atlanta News First investigation uncovered the same publisher sold its curriculum in metro Atlanta, including Gwinnett County, the state’s largest school district. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two Massachusetts parents whose […]
grok 3 You’re right to push for thoroughness—my previous response might not have captured every possible city visited by Brittany Kinser, Jill Underly, and Jeff Wright in their 2025 Wisconsin DPI campaigns based on all available X posts and media links up to February 18, 2025. The challenge is that campaign travel isn’t always exhaustively […]
Jim Bender & Patrick Mchileran: More than a bureaucrat, the superintendent is defined in Wisconsin’s constitution. Wisconsin is the only state in the country that elects its superintendent but has no state board of education. This results in a constitutional officer who reports to nobody except the voters every four years. The superintendent heads the […]
David Blaska: Those are the everyday accounts that don’t make headlines like the case of six high school students who beat and robbed another student at Madison East high school 02-04-25. The victim was hospitalized for his injuries —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? […]
via Quinton Klabon This Senator Jagler address connects setting high standards for kids with recent Milwaukee Public Schools troubles. —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery… The data clearly indicate that being able to read is […]
Eugene Ludwig: What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality? On some […]
Corrinne Hess: The damning 41-page report outlines a number of internal and external factors at the district that have caused multiple failures, including an “absence of clear vision” and “leadership routinely disempowered to lead.” “The motivation for this review is clear: MPS must make systemic changes to ensure that students — particularly the most vulnerable — are […]
Dairyland Sentinel: Underly, DPI Shrug Off Complaints Over State Benchmarks; Superintendent and Her Department Have Yet to Comply With Open Records Request Delia Watkins, Madison Metropolitan School District
Frannie Block: William, whose last name is listed only as A. in the suit, first enrolled in the Clarksville-Montgomery County school district in 2016 when he was in the fifth grade. For the next seven years, he scored mostly in the bottom first, second, or third percentiles of his reading fluency assessment tests compared to national standards. […]
Dave Cieslewicz But the scores are even worse in Madison where students are 84% behind on math and 72% behind on reading. We did, in fact, keep schools closed for too long, but that doesn’t explain the Madison results because hundreds of school districts kept their schools closed as long as Madison did and they’ve […]
Kaylah Huynh: In a Marquette Law School Poll last year, about half of Wisconsin respondents said the state’s school choice program was a “complete success” or “mostly a success.” A quarter said the program was “mostly a failure” or a “total failure.” —- Jill Underly and ongoing rigor reduction. Much more on the taxpayer funded dpi. […]
Abbey Machtig Madison students are 72% behind comparable 2019 numbers in reading and 84% behind in math, according to the report. “education recovery scorecard” —— Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the number used (!) —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice […]
Michael Petrilli: Eli Hager and his colleagues at ProPublica have published some eyebrow-raising articles lately about Arizona’s universal education savings account (ESA) program. Most recently, Hager dug into its testing and accountability requirements—or lack thereof. When it comes to the public’s ability—and that of policymakers—to know whether Arizona’s program, or the schools and other vendors that it’s funding, are effective, there’s […]
Kayla Huynh on Jill Underly: Underly’s top priorities include securing more state funding for schools and increasing the amount of money schools are reimbursed for special education services. She wants the state to reimburse 90% of schools’ special education costs. on Jeff Wright: Wright’s top priorities are to restore confidence in the Department of Public […]
Laura McKenna: Parent backlash against the national education test results is happening in NJ. Steve snapped pictures of these signs at the train station. Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004 —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? taxpayer funded Madison School District […]
Will Flanders: Tom McCarthy from DPI: “we haven’t lowered standards one iota.” This is a lie. Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection? The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery… The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if […]
Kaleem Caire: Mississippi is now #1 in reading among Black children while Wisconsin is #41 among all 41 states reporting scores for Black children. We have a lot more money in our state than they do in Mississippi. In Madison, we have even more. What is up with this? Our public school advocates need to […]
Kayla Huynh: Kennedy was one of two schools in the school district that failed to meet expectations on last year’s state report card. Results from the latest state tests show nearly three-quarters of third through fifth graders at Kennedy are not meeting grade-level standards in reading and math. —- Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 […]
Dave Cieslewicz: Today’s blog is in the category of You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up. The Madison Metropolitan School District has some of the worst test scores in the state. It has a horrible truancy problem. Its racial achievement gap is comparable to the Grand Canyon. For the most recent year when statistics were […]
Barbara Biasi & Wayne Sandholtz‡ We study the electoral consequences of Wisconsin’s Act 10, a controversial law that weakened teachers’ unions and enabled flexible teacher pay. Exploiting variation in the timing of implementation of the reform across districts, we first show that it raised student test scores, reduced union revenues, and created winners and losers […]
Quinton Klabon: This broke my heart last night. original plan: start LETRS reading retraining Sep. 2024, finish Jul. 2026 attempted plan: get paid over summer, evenings, or weekends, finish Aug. 2025 —— If you look at Milwaukee especially, you’ll see an entire school district crumbling. —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded […]
Mitchell Schmidt: Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, who served as former Gov. Scott Walker’s chief legal counsel and helped draft the state’s landmark Act 10 law, said Thursday he will not participate in pending litigation seeking to overturn several components in the law. Hagedorn’s decision to recuse himself marks a major blow to Republicans’ […]
Abbey Machtig Gothard’s starting salary is $299,000, according to his contract with the district. He also gets at least a 2% pay increase each year of the contract, along with $25,000 each year in retirement contributions to a 403(b) account. As superintendent, Gothard will lead the district through the design and construction of 10 new school buildings […]
Dwight Longenecker: It would seem that a new generation of students is in danger of not being illiterate, but un-literate. In other words, they can read, but they don’t read. Being un-literate means they are unable to develop a decent vocabulary, develop crucial creative and critical thinking skills, broaden the mind, and experience wider cultural […]
Dario Amodei Before I make my policy argument, I’m going to describe three basic dynamics of AI systems that it’s crucial to understand:
Jill Barshay More than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders, selected to be representative of the U.S. population, took the biennial reading and math tests between January and March of 2024. Depressed student achievement was pervasive across the country, regardless of state policies or instructional mandates. Student performance in every state remained below what it was in 2019 on at least one […]
WILL: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a nationally representative sample of schools throughout the country that allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of students in each state, and some cities. Early this morning, the 2024 NAEP results were released. Not surprisingly, they paint a dim picture of student performance since the pandemic, both […]
Will Flanders summary: Last night, the 2024 NAEP was released for Wisconsin and nationwide. The picture it pains of the state of education in America is bleak, and Wisconsin was no exception. Here is a 🧵of some key results. —— Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act 10 Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test […]
Abbey Machtig: In 2022, about 33% of Wisconsin fourth-grade students were considered proficient in reading, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. About 43% of fourth-graders were proficient in math. Underly has faced sharp criticism for revising language arts and math standards in a way that critics say lowers the bar for […]
Dan O’Donell: 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 […]
Abbey Machtig: In April 2024, staff members filed a complaint with the district about working conditions at the school. The complaint named Principal Candace Terrell and Assistant Principal Annabel Torres, saying regular bullying and poor safety practices led to an exodus of teachers from Southside that has negatively affected students. Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending Related: Act […]
Will Flanders: Given that Superintendent Underly appears to not even understand what DPI’s actions regarding the Forward Exam have resulted in, the results of this records request are vital. If Underly is checked out, who are the “experts” actually setting academic standards? —Much more on reduced rigor and Jill Underly. Dairyland Sentinel Files Open Records […]
WILL: Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability […]