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Issue Paper SnapshotStudent Achievement |
Education for the vast majority of students is better in many respects than at any time in history. A recent report showed that nearly two-thirds of 1998 high school graduates in the United States are continuing their education beyond high school.
Graduation rates for Wisconsin students have surged in the past 50 years. Nationally, fewer than 30 percent of U.S. students graduated from high school in 1930. In Wisconsin, about one-third of Wisconsin adults had at least a high school diploma in 1950. By 1990, the number had reached 80 percent. Today, 91 percent of Wisconsin students complete high school.
Talking Issues
- Wisconsin high school students have placed first in the nation for the past 14 years (as of 2003) on the ACT college entrance exam. Two-thirds of Wisconsin’s graduating seniors take the ACT.
- Over the past two or three decades, test scores in mathematics, reading, writing, and science reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are essentially stable. This means that students in school today are scoring at about the same level as adults who are now in their thirties and forties did when they were in school.
- On international assessments, students from the U.S. tend to have a mixed performance (with the lowest scores found among seniors, who have little or no stake in the results of these tests). If Wisconsin were treated as a country, only students from Singapore would have scored higher in science in 1995. In mathematics, Wisconsin would have ranked 6th in the world.
- Critics of public schools often offer anecdotal or selected test data when arguing that the public schools are failing.
For More Information
Also see:
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction at http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/
National Center for Education Statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/
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