Dan O’Donell:

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has never been the most unpredictable man in the world—in each speech one can expect a few “by gollys” and references to pickleball—but on the first day of this year’s legislative session, he delivered a shocker when asked about State Superintendent Jilly Underly’s decision to change K-12 testing standards.

“I hate to even talk about things that aren’t my purview anymore in the Department of Public Instruction, but I just think there should have been some information and dialogue happening with all sorts of people before that decision,” he said in a news conference earlier this month. “It’s hard to compare year to year if one year you’re doing something completely different.”

In August, Underly’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced changes to Wisconsin’s Forward Exam that renamed each level of achievement and made it much easier to attain each level. The standards, which appear on DPI’s school and district annual report cards, were for decades labeled as “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” and “below basic.”

Those were changed to “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching,” and “developing,” which appear designed to sound better to parents and legislators concerned about student performance. They would naturally react more strongly to a student who is “below basic” than to one who is “developing.”

This change alone would have relatively innocuous, but it was paired with a complete overhaul of the benchmark scores needed to reach each level. For instance, previous scores ranged from 517 to 611 in third grade math. The new standards have a range of 1,370 and 1,740, making comparisons to prior years impossible.

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more on Jill Underly, here.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-