On Weakening State Standards, and why we shouldn’t require parents to “get their hands dirty” to know how students & schools are doing.

The Masai greet each other with a profound question: “And how are the children?” When it comes to academic outcomes in Milwaukee, the answer is deeply concerning. The primary purpose of any school is to educate, yet in far too many Milwaukee schools, our children are not faring well academically.

In this week’s second installment of our series examining the critical challenges facing Milwaukee’s education system, I want to focus on the pressing need to address unacceptable academic outcomes — and call attention to troubling actions by state officials that will blur the picture at a moment when we need clarity.

The Stark Reality

The recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report paints a disturbing picture of Milwaukee’s educational landscape:

• Over 80% of students across all sectors and grade levels not meeting current state proficiency expectations — among the lowest levels of student academic performance in the country.
• Milwaukee’s academic outcomes continue to trail national averages, even when adjusted for demographic and economic factors.
• Proficiency rates at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) remain abysmally low, including among the lowest performance for Black students and largest Black-White performance gaps of any major urban district.
• Outcomes across the rest of our city’s publicly funded schools are modestly better in comparison but still trail far below state and peer city averages.

These statistics are not just numbers; they represent tens of thousands of children whose futures are at stake. And for us, while this story is dire — it’s not new. We’ve covered in some depth on multiple occasions our concerns about Milwaukee’s academic crisis — and the ways in which our state’s Report Cards for schools and districts obscure and distort reality.

This rating system is fundamentally flawed. For example, there is a private school rated as “exceeding expectations” when almost no students are proficient. It also claims a district is “meeting expectations” when 90% of students can’t do math at grade level, and over half are far below. This system is deeply flawed and doesn’t show the real challenges our city’s students face.

We cannot continue to gloss over these issues by assigning school ratings that reflect embarrassingly low expectations for what Milwaukee students know and can do. This is a crisis that demands our immediate and sustained collective attention.

Moving the Goalposts: DPI’s Troubling Weakening of Standards

Rather than facing these brutal facts head-on, DPI is yet again moving the goalposts — making changes to how state assessments are scored and School & District Report Cards are calculated. Instead of dealing with the tough reality, they’re making it impossible to compare this year’s results with previous years.

In fact, when asked during a Wisconsin Eye broadcast if parents could reasonably assess how students are performing now compared to before the pandemic, Thomas McCarthy, Deputy State Superintendent of Public Instruction, responded that “Parents must get their hands dirty” to determine if a school performs well for their child.

This stance is deeply problematic for several reasons. Primarily because it unfairly shifts the responsibility of data interpretation and analysis from education officials to parents. But also because it contradicts the fundamental duty of public education systems to provide clear, accessible information to all stakeholders.

For more than a decade, thanks to then State Superintendent and now Governor Evers, Wisconsin’s proficiency standards have been aligned with NAEP proficiency. But now, DPI officials admit they’ve changed this. They did it secretly, making participants sign agreements not to talk about it. They announced the changes in late August — and won’t provide families with their children’s new scores until October, more than a month into the new school year. And these changes have lowered expectations for how well students should perform.

Standards are important — they show what we expect students to know and be able to do. As a teacher, advocate, and parent, I believe it’s wrong for state officials to lower these expectations. NAEP’s definition of proficiency — “demonstrated competence over challenging subject matter” — is an appropriately rigorous and high bar, and what I expect for my own children. The new and weakened standards only require “partial mastery” of foundational skills. This isn’t enough to make sure Milwaukee’s students are ready for thriving, productive lives.

CFC’s Call to Action

Here’s what we believe needs to happen:

1. DPI should publicly release at least three years of test results that use the same standards. This way, we can see how students and schools are really doing over time — something that’s especially important as our students continue to recover from pandemic-era disruptions to learning.
2. State lawmakers should work with Governor Evers to fix the state Report Card, and ensure that both proficiency and growth matter in measuring school and district performance.
3. DPI and/or state lawmakers should commit to publicly releasing state assessment results to families by August 1st each year. Wisconsin remains one of the latest states to report these results, which means parents can’t use this information to make school selection choices, or to inform their beginning-of-school conversations with their child’s schools.
4. State lawmakers should look into ways to match our standards with the national NAEP test again. They should also make sure that any future changes to these standards are done openly, with the public involved and proper supervision.

At City Forward Collective, our stance remains firm: Milwaukee’s students, families, and educators deserve clear, consistent, and high standards for student outcomes, not shifting metrics that seek to mask reality. Wisconsin should continue on the course that Tony Evers started by continuing to advance rigorous academic standards — and not settle for following other states by lessening our expectations for what our students know and can do.