(The Center Square) – Parents across Wisconsin have a new tool to track how well their kids’ or community’s school is doing.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty recently launched its “Know My School: Wisconsin’s School Performance Dashboard.” The idea is to put all of the state's school information, spending, enrollment, test performance and discipline in one place.
“The overall goal is just to be a one-stop-shop for information about schools,” WILL’s Will Flanders said in an interview Tuesday on News Talk 1130 WISN. “A lot of this stuff is out there, buried on the DPI website, but for the average person it is really difficult to find. So we want to have one place that you can go and find all of this in a pretty to use format.”
The group says the dashboard will give parents apples-to-apples comparisons between their schools and neighboring schools, or schools across the state.
“There’s really no evidence to support the notion that more money is going to make the difference [in student performance],” Flanders added. “We have districts that get really good outcomes that are spending a little. And districts that spend a lot that are getting bad outcomes. There’s really no rhyme or reason to the relationship you see there. It undermines the argument that more money is going to make a difference.”
Flanders said the dashboard shows that the average school price tag in Wisconsin is now $19,000 per-student.
WILL says the information is important as voters in Wisconsin are set to see dozens of school referendum questions on the November ballot that could add hundreds of millions of dollars to tax bills. And the information comes after Wisconsin’s public school managers changed how it scores student tests.
“Even with these new standards, in many districts throughout the state, in more than half the districts we’re not seeing 50% of the kids reaching [reading] proficiency. Even with the lowered bar,” Flanders explained.
You can find the new dashboard here.