“inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending by Wisconsin school districts now exceeds pre-Act 10 levels”
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 moretaxpayers’ 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.
———
Similar to previous years, Underly made school funding a central issue in her address, urging lawmakers to increase investments in the state’s public school districts, which she said have cut programs, increased class sizes or relied on taxpayers due to “decades of below-inflation funding.”
———
Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.
