When it comes to the status of public education in Wisconsin, it’s Groundhog Day again. The new Forward Exam numbers for 2025-26 are out, and they tell a far too familiar story. After three years under the Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s revised cut scores, Wisconsin is still mostly stuck in neutral. English/Language Arts proficiency now sits at about 53 percent statewide. That is up from 51.1 percent in 2023-24. An increase is better than a decline, but the movement is marginal.
Starting with the 2023-24 school year, DPI lowered proficiency standards, meaning we only have three years of comparable data. The result of this change was an immediate jump in reported proficiency that had little to do with what students actually learned. Therefore, comparing today’s 53 percent proficiency figure with results prior to 2023-24 is not possible. But even on the new, more generous scale, almost five in ten students are still not meeting grade level expectations. Perhaps the modest improvement since 2023 is indicative of some impact of the implementation of Act 20 and the “Science of Reading” around the state, which aimed to move away from ineffective techniques in teaching reading back to the basics that proved to work for decades. But the rate of progress is not enough.
Math is worse. Proficiency has edged down slightly across the same three-year window. Reading, at least, has been the focus of a major statewide reform effort, including implementing the science of reading, new curriculum requirements, and expanded teacher training. Math has not received the same attention. WILL has proposed a similar effort for numeracy, and the numbers here suggest such a change in approach is warranted.
The district-level picture remains bleak in the places that have struggled for years. Milwaukee and Beloit, which have ranked among Wisconsin’s lowest-performing districts for years, still post ELA proficiency rates in the 20 percent range. These are not new lows created by the pandemic, but instead they are the continuation of decades-long failure to meet the needs of students. The picture in Madison looks somewhat better on the surface but, as has recently been pointed out by Quinton Klabon in a recent piece for the Badger Institute, the district deals with significantly less challenging demographics than other large districts in the state, and still produces poor results.
Table 1 shows the districts with the highest and lowest percentages of students meeting or exceeding expectations in ELA. Again, many of these would be found at the top and bottom of the list every year. Fox Point J2 was highest-performing district in the state, while Menominee Indian had proficiency rates half as high as the next lowest district. The map that follows shows he data for every district in the state.
Forward Exam ELA, 2025-26: percent meeting or advanced
Districtwide Forward results only, grades 3–8 pooled. Mapped value is Meeting + Advanced.
The gaps by race and income are just as persistent. Statewide, roughly 20 percent of Black students reached proficiency in English language arts, compared with 63 percent of White students. That is a gap of more than 40 points. As it relates to economic status, about twice as many low-income students are not meeting expectations as higher-income students. These disparities show up year after year on both the Forward Exam and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The latest release does not indicate these gaps are closing in any meaningful way.
It is expected that DPI will release the full school and district report cards in the coming weeks, and we will have more to say then. Those reports have their own history of softening accountability—few districts ever land in the lowest category, even when proficiency rates are dismal. But they do provide additional demographic data that allows us to paint a more complete picture of what is happening in Wisconsin schools.
Until then, mothing in the Forward Exam data released this week, or Dr. Underly’s State of Education speech last week, suggests DPI is treating the current results as a crisis that requires urgent changes in standards, curriculum, or consequences for chronic underperformance. Wisconsin spends more per pupil, adjusted for inflation, than it did at the start of the century at $18,746 per student. Yet the outcome measures subsist at pre-pandemic levels while other states like Mississippi that were once well behind us on national reading assessments have passed us.
The 2025-26 Forward Exam results are a continuation of a pattern of stagnation that we have experienced for many years in Wisconsin. The numbers are public on WISEdash. What remains missing is a serious plan by those in power to make the next set of results measurably different
WILL has provided ideas to correct course in Wisconsin via our Wisconsin Education Comeback proposal, and we hope that DPI and policymakers will take the ideas seriously. Wisconsin’s students and families deserve more than another year of disappointing results followed by calls for more funding.
