The Assembly Committee on Education meets today at 10 a.m. The following testimony is being submitted in favor of Assembly Bill 1.
Feb. 6, 2025
Chairman Kitchens and Assembly Education Committee Members,
Thank you for hearing Assembly Bill 1, legislation designed to return Wisconsin’s academic standards to the high levels from which they were lowered by Superintendent Jill Underly and the staff at the Department of Public Instruction.
Like everyone, we shared the same reaction as Governor Evers when we were surprised by the drastic changes revealed just prior to the required release of the data.
The DPI’s actions lowered cut scores, detached our standards from NAEP proficiency levels, and modified the tests in ways that render comparisons to previous testing data impossible. In short, the changes force Wisconsin to start over with education data after lowering the bar.
An example from the results of the DPI’s Forward exam and from the just-released NAEP tests illustrate the problem.
