Know My School: Wisconsin’s new dashboard centralizes school spending, enrollment, test and discipline data

# Quick summary Liberty (WILL) released a public tool called Know My School: Wisconsin's School Performance Dashboard. It consolidates school-level information the organization says is scattered across the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) site — items such as spending, enrollment, test performance, and discipline — so parents, community members and voters can compare schools more easily.

# What the dashboard contains The dashboard gathers several concrete data streams for each school and district: per-student spending, enrollment counts, test scores, and discipline records. WILL promoted the dashboard as a single place to find that data in a more user-friendly layout than DPI's raw files.

A headline figure cited by WILL: the average per-student expenditure in Wisconsin is about $19,000. The dashboard is set up to produce apples-to-apples comparisons between a local school and neighboring or statewide schools.

# Why WILL built the tool WILL describes two practical aims. First, the group wants to make publicly available information easier to find for the "average person" by consolidating data currently buried on the DPI website. Second, WILL intends the dashboard to inform voters as they consider school funding referendums expected on the November ballot, which the article says could add hundreds of millions of dollars to property tax bills.

WILL's Will Flanders told News Talk 1130 WISN that the dashboard highlights how spending and results do not follow a simple pattern: some lower-spending districts get strong outcomes, while some high-spending districts do not. He said that undermines the argument that more money alone will improve student performance.

# Context on test scores and standards The dashboard launch comes after changes to how Wisconsin's public school managers score student tests. Flanders noted that even under the new standards, in many districts and in more than half of districts overall, fewer than half of students are reaching reading proficiency. That point frames the dashboard as a tool to see performance alongside spending and other measures.

# How parents and voters can use it

• Look up your child's school and compare its per-student spending to nearby districts.
• Check test-performance trends alongside discipline and enrollment to see patterns in outcomes.
• Use side-by-side comparisons when evaluating referendum requests or local budget decisions.

WILL positions the dashboard as a starting point for local conversations about where money is allocated and whether current spending levels are producing results.

# What the dashboard does not claim The article presents WILL's interpretation of the data — that more money does not reliably produce better outcomes — but the dashboard itself is described as a data-aggregation and comparison tool. The piece does not provide independent validation of causal links between spending and performance.

# Where to find it

# Bottom line Know My School centralizes multiple public school data points so Wisconsin parents and voters can run direct comparisons. WILL frames the dashboard as especially relevant ahead of a wave of ballot referendums and amid recent changes to state test scoring that leave many districts with low reading-proficiency rates.