Forward Exam, SY 2024-25
All grades, all students. % Meeting or Advanced.English Language Arts
55.3%
State avg 53.1%
District avg 54.3%
County avg 55.6%
+12.8pp since 2023-24
Mathematics
49.0%
State avg 54.8%
District avg 45.5%
County avg 50.5%
+15.3pp since 2023-24
Science
35.9%
State avg 50.8%
District avg 46.2%
County avg 49.2%
-9.8pp since 2023-24
Social Studies
39.1%
State avg 57.0%
District avg 54.0%
County avg 57.9%
-3.8pp since 2023-24
What this means: On the Forward Exam, Wisconsin's statewide test, about 55 of every 100 students at this school read and write at grade level, about 49 of 100 do math at grade level, about 36 of 100 are at grade level in science, and about 39 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 are up about 13 points since 2023, while math scores are up about 15 points, science scores are down about 10 points, and social studies scores are down about 4 points.
BeatsExpectations
Demographically-adjusted score · methodologyTier
UNDERPERFORMING
Bottom 10% of WI schools after controlling for student poverty
Actual proficiency
43.5%
composite math + reading, all grades
Predicted
68.3%
based on WI schools with similar FRL share
Beats by
-24.9pp
below demographic expectation
What this means: About 43% of students here test proficient in math and reading, below the roughly 68% 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 55.3% mean for English Language Arts at Northern Lights Elementary?
It means about 55.3 percent of students tested at Northern Lights 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.
