Vote No campaign misleads on Wichita test scores; they went up after 2008 school bond | Opinion

On Tuesday, voters living within USD 259 will vote on a proposed school bond, which will be utilized to upgrade and rebuild many public schools in Wichita in order to provide state-of-the-art educational facilities for the district’s children.

In response to this forward-thinking initiative, an aggressive and well-funded campaign has arisen to try to persuade voters to reject the bond proposal. As the Wichita Eagle has reported, this campaign refuses to release information on its donors, so it is difficult to discern the true motivation behind its backers’ opposition.

Nevertheless, the Vote No campaign has made a number of specific assertions to back up their opposition, and those claims can be investigated and challenged.

Among the most prominent of the claims made by the Vote No campaign is that the previous USD 259 bond, approved in 2008, did not yield positive educational outcomes for the district’s students. According to Vote No literature, the district “has spent $710 million in bond money on buildings — all while student test scores have plummeted. Clearly, buildings are not the problem.”

This claim is highly troubling — and it’s wrong. Understanding how the Vote No campaign is trying to mislead voters requires digging into the data on student test scores.

The claim that the previous bond yielded declining test scores is misleading on its face, insofar as it lumps together two distinct metrics — building expenditures and student test scores. The implication is that new buildings should serve one purpose — lifting test scores — and not other purposes, such as making schools safe, complying with accessibility regulations, making facilities more energy efficient, or upgrading schools in ways that may not be captured by test scores, like improved science classrooms, art and music studios, and athletic facilities.

Investments in all of those things, made possible by the previous bond, improved the education that students in USD 259 received. And so even if it were true that “test scores have plummeted” since the previous bond, that statement takes a very narrow view of what education is all about.

In reality, though, the claim is not true. Test scores did not plummet following the passage of the last bond. The Vote No test score claim is based on declining average student assessment data from the Kansas State Department of Education between 2015 and 2024.

But the last bond passed in 2008, not 2015. In the years following the bond, student test scores went up, not down, as the Vote No campaign would have you believe. Similarly, student test scores across the district have been rising again for the past several years in this decade.

So why is Vote No using 2015 as its baseline year? Primarily, it’s to maximize the perceived decline in scores made possible by bookending the timeline with years before and after the pandemic, which had devastating effects on student test scores in public schools and private schools nationwide.

It should be noted that, using the same metrics that the Vote No campaign uses to highlight USD 259 test score decline, test scores in schools operated by the Wichita Catholic Diocese fell by an even greater magnitude over that period.

It is true that USD 259 test scores remain lower than statewide averages. This is to be expected in a district with a large (and growing) number of students for whom English is not their first language, students living in poverty and dealing with homelessness, and students with learning disabilities.

But those are evidence of the district’s strength, not its weakness.

USD 259, like other public school districts, educates all students who walk through its school doors.

It doesn’t have the privilege of screening and rejecting students based upon their ability to pay, their disabilities, their religion, or other factors, like the private schools that the Vote No advocates want to force our children to attend.

The Vote No campaign is misleading voters with their scary test score data. The last bond didn’t lead to a decline in student test scores in Wichita. If anything, it contributed to rising student proficiency.

By voting Yes on Tuesday, we can keep that success going and ensure that our strong public school system has the resources it needs to support our children’s future and our region’s economic prosperity.