Does lowering cut scores and changing terminology on standardized tests better serve Wisconsin students?

The overhaul of Wisconsin’s program for standardized testing of the large majority of students in the state amounts to a reversal of an initiative started in 2012 to set higher aims for what Wisconsin students should achieve.

The heart of that initiative was raising the bars connected to labeling levels of success. Set higher aims for students and everyone from school boards to students will rise to meet those expectations.

Frankly, the move didn’t pay off. State scores have remained generally flat for years. But the move did make things look worse for student achievement across Wisconsin because smaller percentages of students were scoring in the higher categories.

Bars for labeling success have been lowered

Now the change is largely being reversed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. The bars for labeling the comparative success of kids have been lowered. Lowered to levels that are more constructive, reasonable and realistic? To levels that undermine efforts to set rigorous goals and improve the overall achievement of Wisconsin students? Different people would have different opinions.

The bars — known as “cut scores” — mark the boundaries between one category of performance and the next higher or lower category on the tests. This fall, when information on state test results from last spring are released to the public, the percentages will rise, although by how much is not yet known.

The moves in 2012 and now are major markers on the paths of Wisconsin — and many other states — through the tricky terrain of goal setting in education and reforms intended to make things better.

Before the 2012 changes in cut scores, Wisconsin was regarded by some national education experts as having some of the lowest bars in the country for defining students as proficient or advanced. For example, the percentages of Wisconsin students who were categorized as proficient in reading and math, using the state’s definitions, were much higher than the percentages who were considered proficient using the definitions by the National Assessment of Educational Progress , a widely followed program used in all 50 states.

NAEP is acknowledged by all sides to be a tough grader. To be labeled as “proficient” on NAEP tests requires a student to do much better than is true on the tests in many states. NAEP leaders say that labeling a student proficient on a NAEP test is not the same as labeling a student as being at grade level. NAEP is, in fact, considerably more stringent.

In Wisconsin in the early 2010s, there was advocacy to raise the bar on student success, with the goal of leading more students to graduate from high school ready for college or careers. The state superintendent of public instruction at the time, Tony Evers (who, of course, is governor now), “NAEPified” Wisconsin’s cut scores. This was in line with education trends across the country at the time.

But the education initiatives and trends of that period faded amid much political fighting (remember the battles over the “common core” curriculum?) and amid limited indications of improved success in school. And that was before the COVID pandemic set things back.

Tom McCarthy, the deputy superintendent of Wisconsin’s DPI, and John Johnson, an adviser to the state superintendent of public instruction, said that many states that adopted more demanding standards for their standardized tests have gone back to using cut scores that are based on somewhat lower achievement levels.

Labels on categories are also changing

Some states have also changed the labels placed on categories of student performance to be less, shall we say, judgmental of students who didn’t do so well. The DPI says it is joining the trend away from “deficit labeling.” The categories in Wisconsin that have been used for years — advanced, proficient, basic and below basic — have been replaced with advanced, meeting, approaching and developing.

McCarthy said, “Deficit mind-set language has been phased out in almost every state.” As for the results from the “NAEPification” of cut scores after 2012, Wisconsin “did not see what we thought we would,“ McCarthy said. Overall results for the state’s students didn’t change much. “We’re returning to something that looks more like our neighboring states,” McCarthy said.

The DPI convened groups of educators in June to analyze student success on specific test questions and to come up with new cut scores that the educators concluded more realistically reflect what should be expected of students in each grade. That is to say, what would be a score associated, for example, with a fifth-grader who is “meeting” what is expected for students in that grade when it comes to reading.

By the way, how do the new categories of state results relate to the term “grade level?” Will “meeting” be the equivalent of “grade level” for assessing a child’s success? Or a school’s success? Or is “approaching” closer to “grade level?” The DPI’s McCarthy and Johnson said that is a hard question. “Grade level” probably falls between “meeting” and “approaching,” they said.

Parents shouldn't rely only on standardized tests to determine how their child is doing

McCarthy and Johnson said parents should pay attention to a broad range of indicators of how a child is doing that provide richer and deeper insights than can be found in state test scores. That better picture can come from more tests or other types of assessments done more routinely in classrooms, other measures of success or even from parent-teacher conferences and similar contacts between parents and school staff.

State tests are done only once a year, and results often are not released until months after the tests are given. Many education experts are critical that too much weight is put on state test scores. State tests, the arguments go, are not that valid as indicators of success, and results frequently match socioeconomic and demographic data for students, with kids from richer communities doing well and kids from poor communities doing poorly.

But for the public at large, including politicians in Madison, members of school boards, civic leaders, outside analysts, philanthropists and news reporters, the test score summaries for schools, school districts and the state as a whole are the most available and best indicators of how things are going, including trends from year to year. (Scores for individual students are not public records.)

Making test scores harder to compare from year to year will almost certainly complicate efforts to see how schools and districts are doing across time.

Wisconsin joins trend in lowering academic aims for students

Will the changes have impacts on the state system for determining what goes in the annual report cards issued for each public and many private schools? A new batch of report cards is scheduled to be released this fall. A spokesman for the DPI said, “School and district report cards include much more data than only achievement/assessment data. Any potential impact on state report cards is unknown at this time, as we are working on analyzing data that will help calculate report cards this fall.”

What is known is that, after a decade of aiming higher, Wisconsin has joined a broader trend to lower its academic aims for students, at least as measured by where the bars are set, and it has gone to more palatable labels for results for many students.

Maybe this will serve to encourage more students to get engaged with school and to see that they have paths to success. Or maybe the more-attractive-looking outcomes overall will resemble the old Miller Lite commercials around the slogan of “tastes great, less filling.”

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu .

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Does lowering cut scores and changing terminology on standardized tests better serve Wisconsin students?