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Most Wisconsin Schools Meet or Exceed Expectations
By Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance staff | November 13, 2018
From WisPolitics.com …
Most Wisconsin schools are meeting or exceeding expectations, according to the latest round of state report cards released today by the Department of Public Instruction.
Across the state, nearly 84 percent of public and private schools and 96 percent of districts earned three stars or more in the five-star rating system in the 2017-18 school year. That’s up slightly from the 2016-17 school year, when 82 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts received at least three stars.
And overall, no district received a failing score this year — which would have kick-started a potential state takeover under the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program. Fourteen districts received a two-star rating, landing in the “meets few expectations” category, compared with 20 over the last school year.
Still, 95 public and private schools earned a one-star rating — down from 117 last year. Forty percent of the schools are in Milwaukee School District, and 7 percent are in Racine Unified School District.
The five-star system corresponds with a graded scale of 1 to 100 and is based on improving student performance, closing of achievement gaps, math and language arts statewide standardized test scores and getting ready for postsecondary education.
DPI officials are also highlighting the 126 schools and three districts in the state that lost points over student absenteeism in the latest report cards — the highest figures ever recorded by the agency. Schools and districts are deducted 5 points if they don’t meet the state’s target absenteeism rate of less than 13 percent.
The agency under this round of report cards also began collecting data to gauge schools’ college and career readiness, including advanced placement participation, dual enrollment statistics and youth apprenticeship participation, among other things, as mandated under the current budget.
The data isn’t being released on the current report cards, DPI Office of Educational Accountability Director Laura Pinsonneault said, but it’s possible it’ll be included on next year’s.
The budget, she noted, doesn’t require the data to be factored into schools’ or districts’ scores. But she noted a DPI Accountability Advisory Group made up of education officials is meeting to make determinations on including data in upcoming report cards and whether any of it should impact overall scores.
The latest report cards also show a large fluctuation in certain schools’ and districts’ over scores from last school year to this one. In all, six districts and 138 schools logged a change of at least 10 points between the 2016-17 report cards and the 2017-18 ones.
That’s down from 161 schools and 24 districts between the previous two report cards. This time around, more than half the 138 schools have 300 students or less and many are rural.
Pinsonneault noted the last three years of report cards marked a change in the way DPI measures schools and districts.
Under the current report card system, school officials must use value-added growth scoring and variable weighting — essentially a prioritization of growth over achievement, particularly in districts with a higher poverty rate. The move was mandated by the last biennial budget.
Pinsonneault said one of the biggest impacts on the decrease in fluctuations is because there are more years of test data from the Wisconsin Forward Exam, which began in the 2015-16 school year. That, she said, leads to more stability when calculating growth scoring.
Meanwhile, DPI will also release a second set of report cards later this year. Those, agency spokesman Tom McCarthy said, will focus on areas highlighted under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
See the DPI release here.
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