Seven years ago, Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) took office after a decade as the Badger State’s superintendent of public instruction. He had the resume to become a nationwide leader in education policy. Instead, his tenure ushered in an era of blocked reforms and educational missteps.
Most galling, State Superintendent Jill Underly lowered the minimum score students needed to earn on the state’s standardized test to be classified as proficient and revised performance labels across the board to make failing scores seem less consequential. As a result, more students “met expectations” even as true proficiency stagnates or declines.
When given the opportunity, Evers failed to reverse these grave errors. Instead, Evers vetoed Assembly Bill 1, which would have restored the tougher standards he put in place as superintendent. Rather than committing to high academic standards, he hid behind half-baked political arguments about the “independence of the state superintendent.”
More recently, he signaled he has no intention of opting Wisconsin into the federal scholarship tax credit program. He dismissed the program as unnecessary, claiming that Wisconsin has “plenty of voucher schools” and the scholarships would be “catastrophic” for public schools. In reality, the program’s scholarships, which are funded by tax-credited private donations, are available to all eligible students — including those in public schools — to cover tutoring, technology, therapies, tuition, and more. By refusing to participate, Evers blocks Wisconsin students in both public and private schools from additional funds.
In this latest legislative session, Republicans introduced a slate of education bills that should have been bipartisan, touching on school discipline, numeracy, and financial incentives for districts to consolidate schools as enrollment declines. By targeting these three most pressing issues in American education, the legislature’s ideas were no less than common sense: preventing teachers from getting assaulted, keeping schools orderly, improving math instruction, and at least trying to wrestle with demographic downturns.
How have Wisconsin Democrats responded? The discipline bill passed through both the Assembly and Senate and awaits consideration by Evers (though several Democrats in the state signaled opposition to it during hearings), the numeracy bill never made it to the floor for a vote, and the Democrats miscast consolidation efforts as an attack on public education.
Even Evers’s supposed policy victories don’t amount to much. Evers signed Act 20, which focused on phonics and early literacy policies, but seeing as 44 states passed similar legislation, this isn’t exactly a stunning achievement. Moreover, after the legislature appropriated $50 million for literacy and created a Joint Finance Committee process to distribute the funds, Evers used a partial veto to try to shift spending authority to the Department of Public Instruction. That move created legal uncertainty and delayed the release of funds to schools, a maneuver the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously rejected as unconstitutional. In short, Evers’s political gamesmanship slowed the delivery of critical literacy resources for students.
One of the few educational policies that Evers has managed to pass is illustrative of a broader disappointing trend in Democratic education policy. In a stunningly overreaching partial veto, he turned a routine funding increase for schools — originally intended for the 2024-25 school year — into a compounding “$325 per pupil” revenue boost set until the year 2425.
This bill will guarantee ever-growing spending without improving student outcomes, force future taxpayers to cover massive costs, and cause property taxes to skyrocket in many districts. It is a political gesture disguised as policy, designed to placate the public-school establishment without actually helping children.
This unimaginative tax-and-spend policy is unfortunately becoming all too common among Democrats. But this wasn’t always the case. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a bipartisan education coalition built a thriving charter school sector, held schools accountable, and truly raised standards, all of which led to academic gains across the nation.
Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere remain committed to such initiatives, so it’s no surprise that a handful of conservative, southern states have boasted academic growth even as scores decline elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the Democrats of today offer no changes to the education system, just more of it — more money, more regulation, more programs, more unions, more credentialing for teachers, and more preschool.
For example, in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed a literacy screener for kindergarteners and first graders, instead demanding $172 million for universal Pre-K. In California, lawmakers only passed a literacy bill late last year — a trend that started in 2022 — after Democrats shot down a 2024 literacy bill under union pressure. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed few education-related ideas, but he’s been clear about one thing: He really wants to kill the Big Apple’s advanced education programming — because socialists love their equality in mediocrity.
IN IRAN, HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWD
Several polls since the pandemic have found that Democrats have lost the advantage on education that they’ve traditionally boasted over Republicans. Evers is emblematic of a larger trend that explains why. If Evers and other Wisconsin Democrats actually care about improving schools, they will focus on reforming and improving our education system, not just political posturing and blank checks to maintain the status quo.
Daniel Buck is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Cory Brewer is a deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
