If you tuned into State Superintendent Jill Underly’s “State of Education” address at the Capitol Thursday, you witnessed a classic (and predictable) display of bureaucratic deflection by a feckless leader who appears to be auditioning for her next gig rather than focusing on her current job.
Underly delivered a sermon accusing taxpayers and lawmakers of abandoning Wisconsin’s public schools. “Our schools are not the problem,” she insisted. “Our teachers are not the problem. Our students are not the problem. The problem is that we have asked them to carry the weight of decades of political decisions.” She went on to claim the school funding formula has failed children, offering her single, predictable cure-all: write a bigger state check.
Throughout her address, Underly spoke far more about funding formulas, referendums, and school systems than about restoring student achievement. Underly’s speech treated schools as institutions to be funded, protected, and sustained at all costs, without regard to performance. Missing was any serious discussion of why so many students continue to struggle academically despite decades of increased spending. In her telling, the primary crisis facing Wisconsin education isn’t the racial achievement gap, literacy rates, or the failure to prepare students for a future beyond high school. No, the problem is that lawmakers are only spending more taxpayers’ money, and not a lot more taxpayers’ money.
It is the exact same script Department of Public Instruction chiefs have read for twenty years, straight through Tony Evers and Elizabeth Burmaster. Underly isn’t an exception; she is just the latest product of a failed bureaucracy. In her worldview, a child isn’t an individual with potential to be cultivated; a child is a vessel for more money to feed the bureaucratic beast, part of a headcount used to justify the next budget request. DPI routinely conflates spending with compassion, measuring its commitment to kids not by whether a third grader can read, but by how many tax dollars flow into the agency.
The data obliterates her argument. Wisconsin isn’t starving its schools. As documented by the Badger Institute, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending by Wisconsin school districts now exceeds pre-Act 10 levels, climbing past $17,400 to nearly $19,000 per student across federal, state, and local funding. Total K-12 spending tops $15 billion annually. Yet as funding marched steadily upward for decades, academic performance collapsed. When throwing record cash at a broken apparatus failed to produce results, Underly rented out a waterpark to lower standards, limit expectations, and tried to hide the truth from parents.
A report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty highlighted how DPI severed its testing standards from national NAEP benchmarks and lowered cut scores, creating artificial double-digit jumps in reading and math proficiency overnight. “The answer cannot be to simply spend more money and hope for better results,” noted WILL Research Director Dr. Will Flanders.
The Institute for Reforming Government uncovered similar tricks on high school testing, where DPI dropped proficiency standards. When lawmakers attempted to investigate how these standards were altered, IRG General Counsel Jake Curtis called out DPI’s dodge, noting the agency “can’t continue to duck and hide” over meetings that led to lowered standards.
Readers of the Dairyland Sentinel know this transparency dodge is an agency habit. Our initial investigation into DPI’s resort junkets revealed the agency spent nearly $370,000 in taxpayer dollars to host a four-day workshop in the Wisconsin Dells, the very event where bureaucrats quietly altered state proficiency cut scores behind closed doors. We followed that up with our Portrait of Deceit investigation, exposing how Underly stacked her “Portrait of a Graduate” steering committee almost exclusively with 26 school administrators and agency insiders, completely shutting out the business community to focus on soft skills over basic reading and math.
Thursday’s address was peppered with charged rhetorical barbs and emotional appeals, but Underly offered no vision and no solutions. Treating taxpayers like dupes standing before a no-limit ATM isn’t leadership. Going back over the speech, her airing of grievances didn’t seem aimed at lawmakers at all. Sure, she provided some soundbites for the final month of the campaigns for governor and the legislature. But this speech struck me as part valedictory, part job interview.
She isn’t good at her current job, doesn’t appear to particularly like it, and seems to be actively looking for another one.
We wish her well in her future endeavors.
