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"With the attention on raising the achievement of low performers as a means to close the gap, will my higher achieving student be 'short-changed' in the process?"

Are MMSD students performing well on the basis of measures or tests traditionally viewed as benchmarks of post-high school academic performance?

There are several measures that are used to assess the academic rigor of programs relative to how well students can be expected to perform in academic setting after high school. Three of these measures include ACT test scores, AP Exam pass rates, and the percentage of student scoring at the highest level on the state's grade 10 WKCE test. Each of the measures is discussed below in detail.

ACT

The ACT assesses high school students' general educational development and their ability to complete college-level work. There are four subject scores in addition to an overall composite index score, each scaled on 36 point range. There are 379 school districts across the state in which over the past five years at least one student participated in the ACT college entrance exam in each of those years. Over the past five years, MMSD students have an average ranking of ninth overall among those 379 districts based on the composite ACT score. MMSD students do especially well on the ACT in math where their average five year ranking is sixth among the 379 districts. Also important to note is that this superior MMSD student performance on the ACT test has been very consistent over this period and, in fact, has increased slightly in the past two years.

MMSD students perform much higher than their peers at other similar large Wisconsin districts, i.e., Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine, and Appleton, and have done so consistently over the five year period.

Compared with the seven smaller suburban districts surrounding MMSD for which ACT data were available for the five year period, MMSD students scored consistently as well as or higher than all of these districts. Again, ACT math performance tends to be very high among MMSD students where MMSD never ranks below second among the eight districts over the five year period.

AP Exams

There are 211 Wisconsin school districts in which students have taken AP exams in each of the three school years 2000-01, 2001-02, and 2002-03. (These are the most recent years available from the Wisconsin DPI.) Based on the average percentage of exams passed by students, MMSD ranks tenth overall. Compared with districts similar to MMSD, i.e., Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine, and Appleton, MMSD students pass AP tests much more often than students in these other districts. Compared with the eight smaller suburban districts surrounding MMSD, the students from MMSD pass AP tests more frequently than all but one of those districts.

WKCE Grade 10 Advanced Proficiency

The State of Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams are used to assess district and school accountability. Students enrolled in Wisconsin public schools take tests in the fall of their grade 10 school year in reading, math, language arts, science, social studies, and writing. The student scores are categorized into one of four proficiency performance levels: minimal, basic, proficient, and advanced. MMSD students traditionally perform very favorably on the WKCE, especially in terms of the percentage of students scoring at the highest proficiency level — advanced.

The WKCE data for districts and school are broken out by a variety of student population groupings. The most commonly reported group are students who have been enrolled in the school for at least one full academic year. This category assumes that a school is reasonably accountable for a student as long as that student has been enrolled and receiving the curriculum and instruction from that school's staff for a period of at least a year. Many students move into and out of school districts with a school year. Using the full academic year category removes those mobility issues that might confound interpretation of the test result data.

When MMSD students are compared to other districts in Wisconsin, the ranking of MMSD in terms of the percentage of full academic year students scoring at the advanced proficiency level is relatively strong. In particular, compared with other similarly sized Wisconsin districts, i.e., Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine, and Appleton, MMSD significantly outperforms each of those other districts. MMSD does less well when comparing the advanced performance of all full academic year students against the smaller surrounding suburban districts. Still, within that comparison MMSD outperforms two of those districts.

When disaggregating the advanced performance test results with a focus on students not considered economically disadvantaged (i.e., non-low income), MMSD does exceedingly well by any comparison. MMSD non-low income student advanced performance on the past three years of WKCE tests far exceeds that of other similar large Wisconsin districts. And even more significant, MMSD non-low income student advanced performance is higher than five of the eight smaller suburban districts surrounding the MMSD.

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