We have probably all seen the “This is Fine” meme—a cartoon image of a dog sitting in a room on fire, either blissfully ignorant or willfully ignoring what’s going on around him. For far too long, this image could also characterize DPI’s approach to public education. While the new standards I’m here to discuss today don’t really make things much worse, they continue a pattern of gaslighting families on the state of education in Wisconsin.
As many of you know, last year DPI lowered proficiency standards on the Forward Exam, breaking from Wisconsin’s prior alignment with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The effect was an 8–10% increase in reported proficiency, despite no actual gains in student achievement. In other words, nothing changed in our classrooms, but suddenly test scores looked better on paper. This kind of manipulation may provide short-term political cover, but it does nothing to solve the real challenges in Wisconsin education. Even states like Mississippi and Louisiana—once derided as the lowest performers nationally—now both surpass Wisconsin on the NAEP in fourth grade reading. And it’s not just that Wisconsin has stagnated while other states have improved, our scores have actually declined.
At the same time, Wisconsin parents are being told to ignore the evidence in front of their faces and simply believe that everything is fine. That is not only misleading but insulting to families who can see firsthand that their children are not being properly prepared for college or the careers of tomorrow.
DPI’s lowering of the Forward exam standards likely necessitated some changes to the report card. But the standards that DPI has developed do little more than perpetuate an accountability system that fails to hold chronically underperforming schools and districts to account. Schools that have failed generations of students can still emerge from this process with ratings that suggest to parents and taxpayers that they are on solid footing. That is not transparency—it is misdirection. Table 1 in the handout shows the percentage of schools and districts that fall into each category of accountability under the current report card system compared to what is expected under DPI’s proposed changes to the standard setting process as laid out in their final report. The same data for districts is depicted visually in Figure 1.
This paints a rosier picture of school performance than the data justifies, giving taxpayers and families a false sense of security. Most troubling of all, the new report card maintains the pattern of never classifying a single school district, and very few schools, in the entire state as “fails to meet expectations.”
That result defies reality. Even after the artificial inflation of proficiency that DPI engineered last year, the state still has seven school districts where fewer than 30% of students are meeting expectations in reading. Along with often-cited failing districts like Milwaukee and Beloit, this list includes Menominee Indian School District, where only 10.9% of students are meeting expectations. These are catastrophic outcomes by any objective measure, and yet under both the current and proposed systems, these districts are rated as at least two stars—suggesting to parents that their schools are functioning at an acceptable level. This is not just misleading; it represents a fundamental failure of our accountability system.
The standard setting here, then, is relatively unremarkable. It maintains the status quo of where we have been on accountability in Wisconsin for more than a decade. Parents and families will remain uninformed about how their kids schools are doing in school. Schools and districts will continue to be able to perpetuate lies about their performance based on a faulty system. What is needed is a radical transformation of the accountability process. An A through F grading scale. A distribution of schools and districts that allows for some to be identified as failing. But there has not been political will in the Governor’s office or the Superintendent’s office to make it happen.
At the end of the day, accountability systems exist to ensure that schools serve students—not the other way around. When the system is designed to avoid embarrassment for the adults in charge rather than to highlight the real challenges facing our children, it is the students who pay the price. DPI’s modest changes perpetuate that path, where chronic underperformance is normalized, parents are lulled into complacency, and the pressure for real reform is relieved. . We need a system that tells the truth, identifies failure, and drives real improvement. Anything less is a betrayal of our kids.
