WEATHER PARK, Wis.— Friday, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill written by Republicans that would have made state education officials grade standardized tests using the same scale they used years ago.
Last year, liberal state schools superintendent Jill Underly changed the benchmarks and scoring levels for student standardized tests used for school district performance report cards. She is running against conservative Brittany Kinser in the spring election on Tuesday. She said she changed the act because teachers in Wisconsin asked her to and that’s how they thought their students could do.
Republicans say that the changes lowered standards to help cheat students get better grades and made it harder to compare Wisconsin students and schools to their peers across the country. Evers said Underly erred because she didn’t start a public conversation about the changes before she made them, but online records show that he killed the bill on Friday morning.
In his veto message, the governor said that even though he doesn’t agree with the process, he doesn’t agree with lawmakers trying to weaken the state superintendent’s power and freedom. Before he became governor in 2019, Evers was in charge of the state’s schools.
If the measure had been passed, school officials would have had to use performance levels set by the National Assessment of Educational Process to grade the standardized English and math Wisconsin Forward exam.
Also, they would have had to use terms from the 2021–22 school year to judge how well students did on the PreACT and the ACT with Writing in English, Reading, and Math. It would be called “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient,” or “advanced” for each level. DPI now uses words like “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching,” and “developing” to describe how well students are doing.
The state Department of Public Instruction would have had to use the same way of scoring report cards for school districts in 2020-21 as it did this year.
