(The Center Square) – Wisconsin should grade all of its K-12 public schools along the same standards, follow nationally recognized standards and make sure simplified summaries are available each year by Aug. 15, a policy statement from City Forward Collective said Thursday.
The policy brief comes after Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction announced it has formed a committee to evaluate state report card standards. The response came following pushback, and a bill passed by the Legislature and vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, asking DPI to go back to standards from 2021-22 rather than using revised standards from the past several years.
A recent City Forward Collective CEO, Brittany Kinser, ran and lost to DPI Superintendent Jill Underly in a recent statewide election. Colleston Morgan Jr., is the group’s current executive director.
“Our position is clear: WI students and families deserve honesty, transparency, and accountability to high expectations – and DPI’s current Report Card fails to meet the mark,” Morgan wrote.
A committee of more than two dozen educators and leaders from public, private, and charter schools will begin meeting in June but names of the committee members were not released.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty urged Evers to sign Assembly Bill 1, pointing out where the state lowered school report card cut points in 2020-21, changed the labels on those in 2023-24 and lowered the cut points again that year as well.
City Forward Collective pointed to a recent school report card showing that 7,000 students taking the ACT were marked as “Meets Expectations, Not College Ready.”
“The changes were done in a way that disproportionately impacted students in historically undereducated groups – widening Wisconsin’s already abysmal opportunity gaps, including our worst-in-the-nation disparities between Black and White students,” the policy statement said. “And, the changes were implemented with little input or feedback even from most K12 school systems – leading to implementation challenges and reduced stakeholder confidence in results.”
The group also pointed out issues within the data with 80% of Milwaukee students not meeting standards but 63% of those are enrolled in schools marked as “Meets Expectations” or higher.
Overall, the Milwaukee school district is rating as three out of five stars and meeting expectations even though less than one in five students in the district – including fewer than one in 10 Black students – meet state expectations.
