Not going quietly
U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner may be retiring from Congress. But he’s not giving up town halls.
Are things really that bad?
The state Department of Public Instruction released data Wednesday on how hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin kids did on standardized tests last spring. In broad terms, the percentages who were rated as proficient or better were not good and were down from both 2018 and 2017.
Well below half of all students were rated as proficient in both reading and math. The gaps in outcomes for white kids and black kids narrowed slightly but for the wrong reason — for the second year in a row, the performance of white kids declined while black kids stayed about the same. The goal for closing the gap is to raise lower scores, not reduce higher scores, right?
So it wasn’t very cheery stuff. But I suggest the answer to the opening question is: Yes and no. Here’s a brief case for each:
Things aren’t so bad
What does it mean to be “proficient”? About a decade ago, Wisconsin significantly raised the bar on what it takes to rate a student as proficient. Since then, the Wisconsin standard is in line with what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) uses. But NAEP, a federal program that goes back to the 1970s, is a pretty tough grader, by its own description.
NAEP’s definition of “proficient” says: “Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”
NAEP leaders say that calling a student proficient is not the same as saying the student is learning at grade level.
As Tom Loveless, a researcher for the Brookings Institution, wrote in 2016, “Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that.”
So, in short, it is fair to say that a lot more Wisconsin kids are performing at grade level (although that term is also hard to define) than the state test results indicate. Furthermore, a recent NAEP study listed Wisconsin as having a higher bar for defining “proficient” than a lot of other states.
The category below “proficient” is called “basic,” which NAEP says denotes “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade assessed.”
I’m no expert, but as someone who watches this stuff fairly closely, I’m increasingly willing to lump “basic” with “proficient” and “advanced” to get a rough measure of whether kids are on grade level. And if you do that, you come up with — to give one example — about three-quarters for Wisconsin public school students in third through eighth grade rated as basic or better in English language arts (often just called reading), which certainly looks better than saying well below half are proficient.
Furthermore, we won’t go into how much weight should be put on test scores such as these, except to grant that test scores are not the only way to measure how kids are doing. Often too much weight is placed on scores.
Things are bad
Let’s move to the other side of the argument. Two points are especially worth making.
One involves the kids who are rated as “below basic.” There are a lot of them. On the English language arts side, that’s almost a quarter of all third through eighth graders, 37% of all students considered “economically disadvantaged” and more than half of all African American students. In some schools in Milwaukee, both public and private, more than 70% of students are rated as “below basic.”
In math, the numbers are generally the same or a bit worse.
The number of students rated as “below basic” in core subjects is very high year after year in these same socioeconomic groups and in the same schools. Year after year at a lot of super-low performing schools, little to nothing is done to change this.
The other major point on the downside of the new results is that you can’t ignore the overall trend. At best, Wisconsin is stuck in a static situation. There is a lot of need to do better and it’s not happening. At worse, we’re losing some ground — and there are surely many heavy reasons that is so, ranging from home life and the culture around all kids these days to issues such as teacher quality, curriculum and resources. But there is increasing evidence that we’re actually slipping.
Reactions to the new results have been generally muted. How much so? Neither DPI officials nor MPS officials responded to email requests from me to talk about what ought to be done to improve outcomes overall. The state superintendent of public instruction, Carolyn Stanford Taylor, wasn’t quoted, even in the DPI news release. The longtime prior DPI chief, now-Gov. Tony Evers, issued no comment.
The chair of the state Assembly education committee, Rep. Jeremy Thiefeldt, R-Fond du Lac, issued a statement saying that scores are headed in the wrong direction and calling for changes in the way reading is taught in many schools, emphasizing phonics-oriented approaches over “whole language” approaches. This is an idea that appears to be gaining some fresh momentum. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos questioned how schools are spending money, given the new results.
But I can’t avoid thinking of the broad-based task force created by Vos that made a substantial set of recommendations in 2018 on what could be done in school funding to address big issues. Hardly anything resulted when it came to action on the state budget in 2019.
There is ample history of the status quo prevailing on education issues, amid lots of politicking and not much probing and less-partisan discussion. Thoughtful, bold change? Not so common around here.
What would make this time any different? Maybe that’s a question for a test for Wisconsin adults rather than for school children.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.