Tuesday, December 16, 2025
December 2025: May Your Data be Merry and Bright!
WISEdash Featured Dashboard: Target Group Outcomes
Announcements:
December Student Snapshot Is Complete for 2025!
A Reminder of Snapshot occurred on Tuesday, December 9, 2025. Validation errors and warning s should still be corrected in your SIS and pushed to WISEdata Portal. Any inaccurate data captured in the snapshot can be accounted for by submitting a Data Errata letter.
Snapshot data will appear in WISEdash for Districts within a few days after the snapshot. This data, however, will not be visible in the WISEdash Public Portal for many months. All of the data needs to be made anonymous for public reporting, and other data quality validations occur to prepare the data for the WISEdash Public Portal.
School Directory Management Portal: School Year Flip
The School Directory Management Portal will be closing soon. Partner Support team sent a communication, reminding all LEA staff with the WISEsecure user role of “Directory Admin” to complete their School Directory required annual updates on December 2, 2025.
Close and Open Dates for the School Directory:
- CLOSES: Monday, December 19, 2026.
- As of this date, no more changes can be made to 2025-26 data in the School Directory Management Portal.
- OPENS: Thursday, January 29, 2026.
- Local education agencies (LEAs) can now begin updating School Directory information for the 2026-27 school year.
Learn more about the School Directory Timeline.
Annual Required Updates in School Directory
Schools are required to update their information at the beginning of every school year. These updates ensure that DPI has accurate information about Wisconsin schools pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 115.30. If schools do not make these updates, it can result in lack of proper communication between DPI and our Wisconsin LEAs, validation messages for outdated data, and inaccurate information posted on the School Directory Public Portal.
DPI requires these updates from all public school districts, private schools, and charter schools that submit to WISEdata.
To make changes using the DPI School Directory (Management) application, you must have the appropriate School Directory user role. The WISEsecure role needed is "Directory Update" for the School Directory Management Portal. If you do not have this user role assigned to you, please request the user role using the WISEsecure application. You can also submit a Help Ticket.
Required Annual Updates: Agency-Level
Required Annual Updates: School-Level
- Address
- Mandatory Contacts, Contacts Information
- School Type
- Grades Offered (Low Grade/High Grade)
- PK Services (not required for private schools)
- Virtual School Status (not required for private schools)
- First Day of School-Last Day of School
Please read the School Directory User Guides for your agency type for instructions on how to update each of the data elements listed above.
Spotlight on Strong Data: WISEdata Conference 2026: Registration Coming Soon!
The 2026 WISEdata Conference takes place on March 17, 18 & 19, 2026, with a theme of, “Building a WISE Community to Connect, Modernize, and Collaborate.”
The sessions are listed on the WISEdata Conference webpage: by day and time, and by session track.
Data Quality Tip
Data Errata: Post-Snapshot Clean Up
The snapshot is done for 2025. We thank you for all the hard work and dedication to the task of presenting the most accurate data possible, both for the snapshot and beyond. LEAs are expected to continuously address data related to a validation warning or error. Correcting data in your SIS and pushing the corrected data to WISEdata Portal is best for the data for trend comparisons in the future. If you have inaccurate data that was captured in the snapshot, we have a way for you to acknowledge that.
Writing a Data Errata letter is the best way to acknowledge misreported data and provide the accurate data that should have been captured in the December snapshot. A data errata letter will not change your snapshot data. Snapshot data is considered certified and final.
Posting a data errata letter, however, displays your accountability to the data submitted by your agency. Popular resources to learn more about data errata are:
- The Data Errata landing page, which is where your submitted letters are linked and displayed for public access, after they’ve been submitted through the WISEadmin Portal.
- The Snapshot Preparation Guidance webpage, Data Errata section.
There should be no personally identifiable information (PII) about students or staff in your data errata letter! Data Errata letters are submitted in the WISEadmin Portal by persons with the District Admin user role.
WISEstaff Preliminary License Audit Results
The WISEstaff preliminary reporting deadline was November 11. All agencies should have submitted staff and assignment data for those staff with assignments that require a license, passed validations, reviewed all staff reports in WISEstaff and indicated that they are certified for the “Preliminary Agency Certification.” The preliminary snapshot only requires info for assignments and staff who require a license. Non-licensed staff and Contract data will be required to be entered by the final certification.
The Bureau of Educator Licensing will use the preliminary snapshot to generate three audit reports. New this year, the audit results will be available by late November. Using automated functionality with the audit software will return your results a full month earlier than past school years.
As this is the first time the department is not manually reviewing the results, reach out to licensing if you have questions about the results. Please note, the audit is generated based on the information from WISEstaff as of the date of the preliminary snapshot and licenses issued on the date of the audit.
Any changes are made in WISEstaff after the preliminary snapshot will not be reflected in your preliminary audit results.
Once your preliminary audit is complete, make corrections to assignment coding as needed.
WISEid: Change Requests Pending
Remember to look for Change Requests with a status of “Pending District Verification” so that you can review and approve them. Changes aren’t applied to WISEid data until that status changes to Approved.
App Feature: WISEstaff Staff Collection Checklist
Step 3: Review Preliminary Audit Results and Apply Corrections.
The Staff Collection Checklist picks up on Step 3 with the completion of the preliminary staff audit.
Remember, the audit is not dynamic; the system only reviews what was submitted by the preliminary audit deadline (i.e., November 11, 2025). If you continue to submit data through WISEstaff after November 11, these data will not be reflected in your preliminary audit.
Between now and the final certification deadline (March 24, 2026), Step 3 of the Staff Collection Checklist asks you to complete the following:
- Review the data in your preliminary staff audit.
- Locate Entity IDs for all staff requiring a Wisconsin educator license.
- Upload or finalize contract data.
- Enter aggregate assignments for custodial and kitchen staff and/or bus drivers.
- Review the Data Quality Dashboard and verify that your data is accurate and correct. The WISEstaff application and the User Guide will both refer you to the Reports screen. Please review the reports listed and ensure that data is accurately submitted.
- Correct all errors and either correct or acknowledge all warnings. Some warnings may require you to type a comment to explain why the warning isn’t being resolved before you can acknowledge.
Please join us at the weekly WISEstaff User Group calls, which occur weekly on Tuesdays, from 11:00 a.m. – Noon, from now through March 2026. Visit the WISE Events Calendar to join.
WISEdash Featured Dashboard: Target Group Outcomes
Back in the fall of 2021, the release of the school and district report cards introduced the new Target Group Outcomes priority area. Target Group Outcomes examines multiple measures for students in roughly the bottom quartile (25%) of performance based on the prior year’s test results, using a multiple measures “mini report card” scoring approach. One of the most common questions DPI receives is, “Which students are in my target group?”
DPI designed the Target Group Preview Dashboard in WISEdash for Districts to help address this question with as much time as possible ahead of the report card release. Navigate to the dashboard via Dashboards, Early Warning, Report Card, Target Group. It is useful for continuous improvement purposes and shows each student’s likelihood of being in the next report card’s target group based on the most recent assessment results.
Students appear in the dashboard with an assigned target group probability – “High” for students at or below the 30th percentile, “Medium” for students between the 30th and 50th percentile, and “Low” for students above the 50th percentile. The probability is assigned based on a school-level percentile rank determined by a standardized z-score. Z-scores allow for relative comparison of students within a school, across grade level and test product. The district dashboard page is an aggregation of all the school target groups combined; students are not ranked district-wide but only within schools.
The dashboard is designed to help schools identify their lowest performers so they can close their own “gaps” between these students and the rest of the student body. Schools should strive to narrow these gaps by implementing policies and procedures that will best serve the students most in need of support while also improving opportunities for all students. The dashboard explicitly highlights exactly which students need the most support.
The Target Group Preview dashboard is not live, but the data are updated regularly. Data for the current school year first becomes available in the weeks following the third Friday in September. It is then updated weekly until the WISEdata Student Snapshot in early December. The dashboard is deactivated at the end of the school year in preparation for loading the following year’s data.
For further information about the Target Group Outcomes priority area on the reports cards (including, data components, scoring, weighting, etc.), please see the Target Group Outcomes Guide on the Report Card Resources page.
Happy Dashboarding!
Upcoming Events
Training Opportunities:
- WISEdata Conference: March 17, 18, & 19, 2026
Recurring Training:
WISEdata New User Training: First Wednesday of the Month
- Wednesday, January 7, 2026: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
BI-WEEKLY WISE User Group Call: EVERY OTHER Tuesday, January - May
- 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
WEEKLY WISEstaff User Group Call: EVERY Tuesday, October - March
- 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Upcoming WISEdata Events
3/10/26
3/10/26