Here & Now

State Legislators Discuss Decline in Statewide Test Scores

Frederica Freyberg:

From health news to a closer look at education and the stubborn achievement gap problem in Wisconsin. It’s a problem State Superintendent of Schools Carolyn Stanford Taylor spoke to in her state of education address Thursday.

Carolyn Stanford Taylor:

Together we can have the difficult conversations about race and equity in our schools and our communities and tackle our achievement access and opportunity gap as the crisis it is. Too many of our students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, and students from low income families struggle to achieve their dreams and reach their full potential. We have to get learning right on the front end or Wisconsin as a state will never achieve true success.

Frederica Freyberg:

Superintendent Stanford Taylor will be a guest on next week’s program. The achievement gap is reflected in a big way in the 2018-2019 statewide test score results. Results that show a decline in student performance overall. According to the state Department of Public Instruction, student test scores show 40.1% of students were proficient or advanced in math. Down a percentage point from last year. Likewise, overall scores in English slipped to 39.3% of students testing proficient or advanced, down from 40.6 the year before. Again the achievement gap between white and black students also persists. For example, in the third grade 12% of black students were proficient in reading compared to 46.1% of white students. In math 15.7% of black students tested proficient compared to 58.5% of white students. The results caught the attention of members of the state legislature, including the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, Republican Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt who joins us from his district in Fond du Lac. Thanks for being here.

Jeremy Thiesfeldt:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

As chair of the Education Committee, what was your reaction when you saw these scores?

Jeremy Thiesfeldt:

Well, this is the fourth year that most of our students have been doing what’s called the Forward Exam. So we have a pretty good dataset available to us now that you don’t feel like you are making flippant judgments based on one year of data. So when I saw these results and I noted that there has been a pretty consistent downward trend through all four years of them, it raised some concerns on my part because I have a significant role and I appreciate having that role, but we can still take some comfort that Wisconsin is still ahead of most other states. But it is concerning to me that we most certainly are not headed in the right direction. Our scores are trending downward quickly. It appears to be trending downward quickly. And if you were to go into the subgroups in particular districts, you’ll find that there were drops in the scores as much as between 10 and 15% between year one of the Forward Exam and year four of the Forward Exam. It’s time for us to stop talking about this and do something about it.

Frederica Freyberg:

I want to ask you in a moment what you think we should do but you say that the legislature has “dedicated increasing amounts of funding toward K-12 every year since 2011.” But in the 2011-12 budget, GPR funding for schools was cut $426 million. How do you figure increases since 2011?

Jeremy Thiesfeldt:

That may have been an error on my part. I probably should have said 2012. I know there were some cuts in that first budget. There were cuts across the board in the budget. But since that time, there have been increasing amounts of dollars invested in education and particularly the last two budgets very healthy amounts. And we are simply not seeing results from that. Now, the standardized test scores are certainly not the only measure you would look it but it is a concrete measure and it is a valuable tool and these results are headed downward. And I do not believe that this is a money problem. I believe that this is a methodology problem. Particularly in our reading scores.

Frederica Freyberg:

So you were suggesting that we need to do something else. What do you think we need to do?

Jeremy Thiesfeldt:

Well, some of that is being formulated yet. I’m not going to produce a plan until I have a pretty good idea of which direction I want to go and until I’ve collaborated with some other stakeholders on the issue. But focusing in particular on reading because I strongly believe that reading is at the core of all academic studies. If you cannot — if you cannot effectively read, you cannot effectively learn. I don’t care what subject it is, you have got to be able to read in today’s world and read effectively at or above grade level in order to have — really have success in our world today. And so we have had and this goes back to even when I was in college back in the 1980s. And there was this whole language approach to reading that started to take hold. And that has permeated schools not just in Wisconsin but across the United States. And the results have been decreasingly — have been increasingly poor as the years have gone by. We need to return to a phonics-based approach to reading instruction. And this needs to start at our colleges and universities who train our teachers. And we have to find a way to get the professors of these schools to stop hiding behind academic freedom and seemingly going with whatever the flavor of the month is in academia, and go with what we know science tells us historically-based is how children learn to read effectively.

Frederica Freyberg:

We need to leave it there. I understand this is quite a controversy in the academic world. So Representative Thiesfeldt. Thanks very much.

Jeremy Thiesfeldt:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

We move now to the other side of the aisle. Democratic Representative LaKeshia Myers is also on the Assembly Education Committee. She is a former trainer of teachers at Milwaukee Public Schools and she joins us from Milwaukee. Thank you very much for being here.

LaKeshia Myers:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

As we asked our last guest, what was your reaction when you saw the most recent student test scores?

LaKeshia Myers:

My initial reaction was to dive deeper. I take scores with a grain of salt because I know how they can be skewed. I know how it is for students to take a NAEP exam or the Wisconsin Forward Exam. I know what it’s like to guide students through that process. And you get a mixed bag of reactions from students who are tired of test taking and those who, you know, may just want to get it over with. And you may also get students who are genuinely nervous about taking assessments. And there are so many of them you have to look deeper into what the assessments actually curry. When you think about looking at the NAEP assessment, the NAEP assessment is one that is quite frankly graded harder than other assessments. What it takes for a student to be labeled as proficient is much more than it would be in — on most other assessments. So when I look at — go ahead.

Frederica Freyberg:

I was just going to say I get all that but why is student achievement as measured by these tests declining in Wisconsin in your mind?

LaKeshia Myers:

I think it can be a bit of test burn-out for students quite frankly. I think when you do the ACT, which is looked at as the gold standard in our state, however we have to look at the fact that not all students will be going to a four-year college or university where they may, quite frankly, not need the ACT assessment. I think when you look at alternatives of ACT like the ACCUPLACER assessment where students are going to a trade or technical college, they will take the ACCUPLACER versus taking the ACT, where it will grade them on skill base and knowledge base for the field that they’re planning to enter. So I think we have to look at everything and not just go down one particular path in grading students.

Frederica Freyberg:

Do you feel as though we should — you almost sound like you feel like we should do away with these standardized tests?

LaKeshia Myers:

Some of them. I think we should go back to proficiency-based assessments. They worked well especially when I was in school. They actually were used to measure what you were actually learning, not some foreign entity from outside of the state creating an assessment to say you should know x, y and z. Because as we know, testing and assessments in general, the numbers can be skewed. The assessments can be inequitable. I think there are different factors that go into looking at assessment data.

Frederica Freyberg:

Do you feel as though Wisconsin K-12 students are then actually better prepared for whatever they are going to do out of school than these results would show?

LaKeshia Myers:

Absolutely, more than likely yes. When I was in the classroom and training teachers for Milwaukee Public School there happened to be on the schedule that students were taking the ACT one day and the very next day they took the ACT work keys assessment. I can tell you that my attendance dropped the next day because students were not willing to invest the time necessary to a back-to-back test. So thankfully that has changed in recent years where we don’t continue to test our students back-to-back to back. I look at maybe quarterly assessments would be better and then judging students on a generalized proficiency-based assessment.

Frederica Freyberg:

What about the achievement gap as shown in these test results? How real is that?

LaKeshia Myers:

I think we’ve always seen achievement gaps especially between African-American and white students but I think one of the interesting takeaways from this recent batch of tests is that you see that white students are scoring lower on these assessments so we can’t really use that as a good gauge anymore. Because we never utilize the scores of Asian students which typically test higher above white students. I think when you look at something as a barometer, we have to go deeper into numbers and find out what is behind them.

Frederica Freyberg:

You definitely would have to go deeper within the numbers I imagine because I can’t imagine that anyone is going to do away with these standardized tests.

LaKeshia Myers:

Absolutely. I’m not saying they’re going to go away. I’m saying we need to re-evaluate what we’re assessing and how we’re looking at them.

Frederica Freyberg:

Representative LaKeshia Myers, I really appreciate your time and input.

LaKeshia Myers:

Thank you so much.