The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released Know My School: Wisconsin’s School Performance Dashboard, a new and improved interactive school data explorer, which provides parents, taxpayers, and policymakers with the clearest picture yet of how Wisconsin’s school districts perform, spend, and grow. The dashboard can be accessed at KnowMySchoolWI.com.
The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “While most of the data displayed on our dashboard is available on the Department of Public Instruction’s website, it’s often disjointed and difficult to draw conclusions from. Our updated dashboard will serve as an important resource to districts, parents, and taxpayers. WILL values transparency and accountability for schools regardless of sector. This dashboard helps achieve those ends by demonstrating how taxpayer money doesn’t drive student outcomes; student proficiency remains low despite DPI’s lowered standards, and that more families continue to choose alternatives to traditional public school.”
New Features: This year’s updated dashboard expands well beyond academic performance, giving users the ability to drill into district finances, staffing, and school-level outcomes side by side:
- – Performance Data: ELA and Math proficiency and growth over time, discipline incident breakdowns, state report card ratings and ACT score trends.
– Enrollment Data: Absenteeism, demographic and enrollment trends by school, open enrollment, and grade-level cohort sizes.
– Finance Data: District debt, revenue and spending, referenda history, and where district revenue comes from — plus a new revenue-vs-ELA-proficiency comparison to test whether more money means better outcomes.
– Staffing Data: Total staff by role, student-to-staff ratios, and how both have changed over time.
School-Level Data: New to this year’s dashboard is the ability to examine individual schools across a range of measures, including enrollment, growth, proficiency, absenteeism, graduation rates, and ACT scores.
Using student-level data, the dashboard also introduces 2023-24 ELA and Math Rank scores, showing how individual schools performed relative to predictions based on the demographics of students in the school. This measure accounts for student characteristics such as economic status, race, English Learner status, and other factors.
Comparison Tool: Users can now measure any district against the statewide average or stack two districts head-to-head across every metric.
2026 Key Findings
Money doesn’t guarantee outcomes:
- – Average per-pupil revenue statewide has reached almost $19,000.
– Lake Holcombe’s per-pupil revenue hit $24,474 — 38th highest in the state — yet only 31% of its students are proficient in Math or ELA.
– Wabeno ranks 22nd out of 421 districts in per-pupil revenue at $27,388, but less than half of its students are proficient in ELA and Math.
– Hartland-Lakeside spends below the state average ($15,000 vs. roughly $19,000 statewide), yet more than 80% of students are proficient in Math and over 77% in ELA.
Proficiency remains low even after DPI lowered its standards:
- – Less than half of students in over a third of Wisconsin districts are proficient in ELA, even with DPI’s relaxed benchmarks.
Discipline remains a serious concern in some of the state’s largest districts.
- – Beloit, Racine, and Milwaukee each report more than 30 discipline incidents per 100 students.
School choice enrollment continues to climb.
- – Statewide choice enrollment grew from roughly 30,000 students in 2016 to more than 60,000 in 2025.
– The largest growth happened in the Fox Valley: Appleton’s choice enrollment grew 368.7% over that period. Fond du Lac’s grew 404.93%. Green Bay’s grew 390.25%.
- WILL believes accurate, accessible data is essential for parents and taxpayers to hold districts accountable. We encourage Wisconsinites to share this resource with parents, teachers, school board members, and lawmakers.
View the new school scorecard dashboard HERE.
