Fond du Lac Schools rise 200 rank places in just 4 years

Four years ago, the Fond du Lac School District ranked 375th out of 421 Wisconsin school districts. Today it ranks 175th out of 420. That is not a rounding error or a methodology change. It is the result of a specific plan, executed by specific people, with outside accountability built in from the start.

The district partnered with the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education and InitiativeOne to design and implement a four-year improvement plan. The results were documented not by the district's own press office but by the Harvard-Stanford Educational Recovery Scorecard, an independent academic project tracking pandemic-era school recovery across the country. Their findings: Fond du Lac was the fastest-improving district in math among Wisconsin's 20 largest districts, and posted the highest reading growth of any district in the state from 2022 to 2024. Evans Elementary received a National Blue Ribbon in 2023, one of the most competitive federal school recognition awards in the country.

The superintendent who oversaw it, Matt Steinbarth, is a Fond du Lac native who started his career as a long-term substitute at Parkside Elementary in 1999. He was elevated to the top job by a 7-0 board vote. The community did not go looking for a turnaround specialist from somewhere else. They promoted the person who had been in the building for two decades and trusted him to finish what he started.

For families considering a move, the trajectory matters as much as the current ranking. A district climbing this fast, with this kind of external validation, is a different bet than one that has been coasting at the middle of the pack for years. The work is documented. The people who did it are still there.