Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin) April 28, 2009

HEADLINE:  Schools Anxious to Reshape Test; Educators Want to Revamp the Statewide Assessment, Which they Call ‘Lousy’ and Misguided

By Gayle Worland

Waunakee public school students were some of Dane County's top performers in this year's Wisconsin Student Assessment System test. But Mike Hensgen, the district's director of curriculum and instruction, won't be celebrating.

"It should be blown up," Hensgen said of the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination, or WKCE, and the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for students with disabilities.

The tests, given to 430,000 Wisconsin students at a cost of $8 million to satisfy state law and the federal No Child Left Behind law, "should be dropped," said Hensgen, "and we should get to a test that would test 21st century skills."
This year's statewide test scores, based on exams taken last November and released today, showed little change from last year in reading skills and a 2 percent rise in math scores. The state's yawning achievement gap between white and minority students continued to close incrementally.

Across Wisconsin, educators like Hensgen are part of a growing chorus to reassess the way the state assesses students. Currently, teachers and districts wait five months for WKCE results, so they have little time to react to the findings and adjust their curriculum. The tests eat into a week of class time and are based on standards that, critics say, are too low to give parents and teachers a clear picture of how students measure up globally.

"It's widely agreed that the WKCE is a really lousy test that measures lame standards," said Phil McDade, a departing member of the Monona Grove School Board. "The bigger issue to me in Wisconsin is that there's a sense of self-satisfaction with our school districts, that we're doing fine, that we're Lake Wobegon, that everybody here's above average."

The Department of Public Instruction commissioned a state task force on the issue last fall and is reviewing the group's recommendations, said Michael Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of schools. The state's current testing contract lasts at least another two years.

There's a lot brewing on the federal level, too - including the Obama administration's interest in revamping test standards and the No Child Left Behind law being overdue for reauthorization.

"It's really kind of an exciting time because the whole issue of rigorous standards will be looked at nationally, and we're poised to do that," Thompson said. "It doesn't mean we'll necessarily test kids more, but the assessments we give kids will be better."

State Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, also is crafting legislation to help overhaul Wisconsin testing. "My goal is to raise standards to international levels," Davis said. "We have great schools in our state, but I look at the vision for tomorrow, 20 years from now, where do we want our kids to be?"

Some school districts haven't waited. Monona Grove - and 11 other schools and districts in the Madison area - are footing the bill themselves to test students in grades three through seven using the Measures of Academic Progress, a computerized test with instant feedback. Eighth-graders take ACT's Explore Test. Those tests track individual progress so students can see what extra help they need - such as "double-dosing" in algebra - before taking the ACT as high school juniors, said Bill Breisch, director of instruction for Monona Grove, whose students also take the state test.

The WKCE's purpose "is to address curriculum gaps," said Madison school Superintendent Dan Nerad, "but it's been overused and over-relied on. These kinds of tests do have a purpose, but we've been using them as the sole focus to judge our overall effort."

HOW THE SCORES WERE TABULATED

The Wisconsin State Journal's analysis of districts' data includes only students who completed the previous full academic year in a single school. The statewide averages are for students who spent the entire year in a single district.

Some districts may present different numbers if, for example, the data include students who stayed in the district but switched schools during the year.
Also, numbers in other analyses may differ because of the rounding of percentages.

Belleville and Deerfield district officials supplied data for some of last year's tests. Those figures weren't included in files provided to the newspaper by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.