Forward Exam, SY 2024-25
All grades, all students. % Meeting or Advanced.English Language Arts
7.0%
State avg 53.1%
District avg 25.3%
County avg 40.0%
-0.3pp since 2023-24
Mathematics
4.4%
State avg 54.8%
District avg 22.3%
County avg 38.4%
+1.6pp since 2023-24
Science
7.7%
State avg 50.8%
District avg 22.2%
County avg 35.3%
+1.3pp since 2023-24
Social Studies
7.1%
State avg 57.0%
District avg 29.5%
County avg 42.6%
-11.2pp since 2023-24
What this means: On the Forward Exam, Wisconsin's statewide test, about 7 of every 100 students at this school read and write at grade level, about 4 of 100 do math at grade level, about 8 of 100 are at grade level in science, and about 7 of 100 are at grade level in social studies. Across all Wisconsin schools, those numbers are about 53, 55, 51, and 57. Reading and writing scores have held steady since 2023, while math scores are up about 2 points, science scores are up about 1 points, and social studies scores are down about 11 points.
BeatsExpectations
Demographically-adjusted score · methodologyTier
UNDERPERFORMING
Bottom 10% of WI schools after controlling for student poverty
Actual proficiency
6.7%
composite math + reading, all grades
Predicted
23.5%
based on WI schools with similar FRL share
Beats by
-16.8pp
below demographic expectation
What this means: About 7% of students here test proficient in math and reading, below the roughly 23% typical for Wisconsin schools with a similar share of low-income students. BeatsExpectations compares each school with others at the same poverty level, not by raw scores, so a school lands here when its results trail those comparable schools, which is not the same as having low scores. A higher-scoring school can still fall in this tier if similar schools score higher still.
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 7.0% mean for English Language Arts at Gaenslen Elementary?
It means about 7.0 percent of students tested at Gaenslen 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.
