Wheeler Report (PDF):

For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, as we read the actual budget language, we became troubled. Despite the defunding of SBAC, nothing in the budget language prohibits the selection or implementation of another Common Core-aligned assessment. Nor does it propose any fiscal plan for the creation or adoption of non- Common Core standards.
As it turns out, we were right to be skeptical.

On April 23rd, the Wisconsin Department of Administration (DoA) issued a Request for Bids (RFB) to replace the SBAC assessments that your proposed budget would ostensibly defund. The RFB was so vague as to which academic standards bidders should use to construct the new assessments that it took two rounds of questions to pin down a definitive answer. On June 5th the truth was irrefutably revealed: For mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), the State of Wisconsin is telling bidders to write assessments based on the Common Core. Even then, there was clearly an effort to make it difficult to get to the truth. The links provided to the math and ELA standards did not directly contain the standards. Bidders and interested citizens, such as us, had to chase a rabbit trail of links and pages finally to arrive at PDF documents that contained the standards—clearly labeled as Common Core.

March, 2014

More than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin.

At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted and have been implementing for three years.

The debate came as lawmakers hustled to push through — or push aside — a host of measures, with the end of the legislative session in sight. Committees on Thursday approved bills to rewrite election rules and provide more oversight of the deaths of suspects in police custody, while a Senate leader declared a bill to limit so-called living wage rules is dead in his house.

But the hot issue of the day was Common Core.

Many Republican lawmakers fear the standards didn’t get enough input and review when they were written and adopted in 2010. They’re proposing a state standards board that could repeal Common Core and write its own standards.

Superintendents at the Senate Education Committee hearing acknowledged the Common Core standards were not perfect and that they could use more time and resources to implement them. But they argued a new committee would just politicize the process while failing to improve outcomes for students.

“(Common Core) is the basis we need to be able to make local adjustments,” said Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.