BeatsExpectations
Demographically-adjusted score · methodologyTier
OUTPERFORMING
Top 10% of WI schools after controlling for student poverty
Actual proficiency
74.5%
composite math + reading, all grades
Predicted
53.2%
based on WI schools with similar FRL share
Beats by
+21.3pp
above demographic expectation
What this means: About 74% of students here test proficient in math and reading, well above the roughly 53% typical for Wisconsin schools with a similar share of low-income students. BeatsExpectations ranks schools against others at the same poverty level, not by raw scores, so a school can post high scores and still fall short of its prediction, or post lower scores and still beat it. This school clears its prediction by about 21 points, placing it in Wisconsin's top 10%.
BeatsExpectations runs a per-state regression of proficiency on free/reduced-lunch share, then scores each school by residual.
How this is calculated →What is Forward Exam?
Forward Exam is the statewide standardized test administered by Wisconsin public schools.
What does "% Meeting or Advanced" mean?
It is the share of students at the school who performed at grade level or above on the test, summed across the top two of four performance levels. A higher number is better.
What does 70.8% mean for English Language Arts at Central - Denison Elementary?
It means about 70.8 percent of students tested at Central - Denison Elementary performed at grade level or above on the Forward Exam English Language Arts test in 2024-25. The statewide average for Wisconsin that year was 53.1%. The other students fell into the lower performance levels.
How is the state average calculated?
It is a weighted average, not a simple average of each school's number. We multiply each public school's score by how many of its students tested, add those together for all schools in Wisconsin, and divide by the total students tested that year. This way a big school with 1,500 students counts more than a small school with 50 students, which is the right way to ask "how did the typical student do this year?". District and county averages on this page use the same method, just scoped to that district or county.
Where does this data come from?
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Wisconsin Forward Exam. School-level All Students subgroup from the WISEdash Download Files. Headline metric is the cumulative "Meeting + Advanced" rate (top 2 of 4 Forward performance levels: Developing / Approaching / Meeting / Advanced).
How often is it updated?
Forward Exam is administered once a year (spring). Results are released by the state in the summer or early fall. We refresh this page after each annual release.
