“see the teachers in red with Wisconsin embazoned on it they are a UW Madison graduate.” UW Madison? The MacIver Institute, Wisconsin’s new think-tank, released a report today by yours truly comparing the NAEP scores of Wisconsin and Florida. Let’s just say that UW-Madison would have probably fared better against the national champion Florida Gators in football. Florida spends considerably less per student than Wisconsin and has a student profile considerably more challenging. Despite that fact, Florida surpassed Wisconsin overall on 4th grade reading (although within the margin of error) on 4th Grade Reading scores in 2007.
Most impressively, this gain was driven by much larger gains among traditionally underperforming student groups. The figure above shows the progress among Free and Reduced lunch kids in Florida and Wisconsin. In 1998, Florida’s low-income students were an average of 13 points behind their peers in Wisconsin. In 2007 however they had raced 8 points ahead.
Among African American students, Florida and Wisconsin once shared space near the bottom in reading achievement. Wisconsin is still there. Florida’s African Americans students now outscore their peers in Wisconsin by 17 points.
http://jaypgreene.com/2009/04/29/forward-our-motto/
Wisconsin related: - The Fordham Foundation found that Wisconsin had the lowest NCLB standards in the country. This study examines the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states. http://www.edexcellence.net/publications-issues/publications/the-accountability-illusion.html This should be a statewide scandal in Wisconsin.
When those federal bureaucrats required us to test students in return for federal dollars, you figured out how to how to drop your academic standards lower than anyone. Beating out Arizona…that’s really impressive. They said it couldn’t be done, but you did it!
When you’ve got schools making AYP in Wisconsin that don’t make it anywhere else, you deserve the satisfaction of a hard day’s work! We want everyone to feel good about their schools after all, whether the students learn anything or not.
http://jaypgreene.com/2009/02/19/real-men-of-accountability-illusion-genius/