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New Berlin district keeps 5‑star rating; consultant walks board through what drives the state report card
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Summary
Dr. Joe Schroeder of the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators told the New Berlin Board the district earned 88.6 and a ninth consecutive 5‑star rating, highlighting value‑add growth, strong target‑group outcomes and how DPI weights measures by poverty rates.
Dr. Joe Schroeder, associate executive director at the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators, told the New Berlin School District Board on Feb. 9 that the district’s overall accountability score of 88.6 delivered a ninth consecutive “significantly exceeding expectations” (5‑star) rating and that every school in the district also scored 5 stars.
Schroeder said the state report card combines multiple assessments and indicators into four priority areas—achievement, growth, target‑group outcomes and on‑track to graduation—and that weightings vary by district according to the share of economically disadvantaged students. “These are a few things to highlight,” he said, before outlining how the cover sheet and the four measures feed the single overall metric.
Why it matters: the score and stars are a public summary of district performance and are often the first point of reference for families and local oversight. Schroeder emphasized that the report card is intended to provide a balanced view of both lagging and leading measures and to spotlight where the district should drill down for programmatic or policy responses.
Schroeder described the tests and measures behind the score: the Forward test (Wisconsin’s state assessment), the ACT and preACT series, and Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) for students with significant cognitive disabilities. He also explained value‑add (growth) scoring, which uses a 0–6 scale; New Berlin’s overall value‑add for English language arts averaged 3.7, a result Schroeder characterized as “more than a year’s growth.”
He drew attention to subgroup data and the district’s target‑group outcomes, saying New Berlin recorded strong growth for several subgroups where sample sizes allowed reporting and noting the state suppresses results when a group is too small to report without identifying individual students. Schroeder also walked board members through how DPI uses up to three years of data, with greater weight on the most recent year, and cautioned that changes in cut scores can affect apparent year‑to‑year shifts.
During Q&A board members asked what a school board should focus on in the report card. Schroeder recommended starting with the system and school cover sheets to identify anomalies, then drilling down into the underlying reports for any area that looks unexpectedly low. He urged members to interpret comparisons in light of district context, especially the percentage of economically disadvantaged students, because the top‑half weightings shift to account for poverty levels.
The presentation closed with Schroeder commending district performance and urging continued attention to growth for the district’s lowest‑performing students. The board did not take formal action on the presentation; Schroeder’s session was informational and intended to guide future oversight and data review.
