Botched report cards, lowered standards, licensing and finance scandals erode faith in DPI
Accused of gutting academic standards, manipulating report cards, slacking on fiscal oversight and bungling oversight of sexual misconduct among teachers, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is facing a crisis of confidence — and new questions about whether it is capable of handling myriad key functions.
The latest blow to Wisconsin’s chief regulator of schools and teachers came with this month’s release of its widely panned new “report cards” on school districts’ performance.
The new report cards rate 94 percent of Wisconsin school districts as either “meeting,” “exceeding” or “significantly exceeding” expectations in a state where, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos pointed out this week, only half of students are proficient in “English language arts” — that is, reading. There is a school in Milwaukee that “exceeds expectations,” according to the new report cards, despite the fact only 13 percent of its students meet or exceed expectations in reading, for example.
Misleading scores “are covering up a failing system that is neglecting our kids,” he wrote Tuesday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The episode is only the latest in a series of missteps by the agency, on matters ranging from educator misconduct to botched finances, that raise questions about whether DPI is capable of acknowledging its own failing grades.
Lower standards
Last year, DPI changed the scoring system on the state’s Forward test for individual students. Those changes included changing “below basic,” “basic” and “proficient” categories to “developing,” “approaching” and “meeting.”
The agency also changed the boundaries between categories, a shift that meant a leap of about 10 percentage points in the share of children “meeting” the standards for proficiency even as unchanged national measures showed declining levels of proficiency among Wisconsin students.
Scores can no longer be compared to students’ pre-2024 performance, DPI itself warned, and Wisconsin’s measures of proficiency no longer match the long-running National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, test that allows comparisons between states.
Lack of transparency
The DPI made the changes — reportedly driven by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly’s dissatisfaction with Wisconsin’s weak showing in cross-state NAEP comparisons — through an internal process not open to public scrutiny.
Criticism arose again earlier this fall when a Madison news outlet, the Cap Times, reported that the DPI failed to sufficiently make public more than 200 allegation of teacher misconduct, including sexual misconduct or grooming, from 2018 to 2023.
Underly complained to the outlet about the coverage without identifying any factual errors, then came under fire herself for skipping an Assembly hearing as the scandal worsened.
Underly did show up to a Senate education committee hearing in November and promised to put the names of educators whose licenses have been revoked by the DPI or voluntarily surrendered to it on a publicly accessible database. Underly said such information always was public, though it’s currently available only by placing an open records request — a far cry from making it easily accessible to potential employers or from proactively notifying affected families.
Underly also pledged to support a bill defining grooming as a crime — a move the department considered in 2018, when now-Gov. Tony Evers was the DPI head. The agency dropped the plan after opposition from teachers unions.
Underly’s pledge came after the Legislature launched an audit of DPI’s teacher licensing process — a process that critics fault for making it difficult to enter teaching without passing through traditional schools of education.
Lack of oversight
The agency also has come under fire for its oversight of school districts’ finances. Only after Milwaukee Public Schools voters narrowly agreed to raise taxes on themselves and on other Wisconsinites by $252 million a year did the district reveal that it was months late in turning its required financial reports in to the DPI. It was later revealed that the DPI kept that information from the public.
The scandal cost the district’s superintendent his job, but later in 2024 it came to light that other districts’ reporting was late, too, and lawmakers ordered an audit of the DPI’s oversight of district finances. The results: Nearly a fourth of school districts were late, problems with their accounting were repeated year after year, and the agency was slow to review districts’ information.
In its curriculum standards role, the agency was accused of foot-dragging after the Legislature required it to phase out the widely used but discredited “three-cuing” method of teaching reading in favor of phonics. A lawsuit over how the DPI would use money set aside for the effort led to a loss for the agency and Evers in the state Supreme Court last June.
The lack of transparency, meanwhile, extends to the operations of DPI itself. The department appears to have more than 600 employees, but a recent reorganization made it difficult to ascertain exactly what they all do.
Many, it is clear, are involved in dispersing federal money that flow through the U.S. Department of Education — another entity whose function and efficacy is being questioned.
“The federal Department of Education furloughed 90 percent of its staff,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday after the 43-day federal shutdown. “And what happened? Nothing. Schools stayed open, students went to class, teachers got paid. The shutdown proved our schools don’t depend on Washington bureaucracy to function. If 90 percent of an agency supposedly governing education can disappear for weeks without disrupting education, do we really need it at all?”
The federal Department of Education unveiled its first steps Tuesday toward dissolving itself by announcing agreements to hand off grant programs to other agencies, with McMahon saying the aim was to “return education to the states.”
In Wisconsin, the DPI’s string of scandals raises the issue with even greater force. If the agency is failing its duties to students, parents, teachers’ employers, and taxpayers, the question becomes: Who is served by keeping so much control of education out of the hands of Wisconsin communities and families and in the bungling hands of the DPI?
Jim Bender is an Education Consultant to the Badger Institute and Patrick McIlheran its Director of Policy.
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