“The question has been, ‘Are we teaching CRT in our K-12 Classrooms?’ And the honest answer is no.” — Jill Underly, April 18, 2022
In February 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) trained educators in the methods of Paulo Freire. Two months later, State Superintendent Jill Underly published her Collective Will series on equity, reckoning, and belonging. The training and op-ed language was not subtle.
Critical Race Theory in universities is a legal theory. The version that reached K-12 classrooms draws heavily on the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Politics of Education. His core ideas are straightforward: education is never neutral; its role is to help students see the world as a system of oppressors and oppressed; and once they see it, they must act to transform that system and society.
The DPI training drew directly from Freire’s framework. Educators were told that those who “authentically commit themselves to the people or commit themselves to equity, diversity, inclusion efforts… must reexamine themselves constantly.” The trainer continued: “those who undergo it can no longer remain as they were.”
That language is Freire’s “Easter Experience” — the revolutionary death-and-rebirth of the self — delivered under official DPI branding. The religious overtones are hard to miss. Another way of accurately describing this “Easter Experience” is psychological architecture of thought reform.
The same training equipped teachers with a specific set of skills. One of them was listed plainly: “(7) Deconstructing existing social order.” Not a metaphor. Not academic theory. A professional skill on a DPI slide. This returns to Freire’s core claims: education is never neutral, and transformation of the existing order is the goal.
The training defined the purpose of critical reflection in Freire’s own words: “The goal of Critical Reflection is Transformative Action or ‘Praxis.’ Praxis is reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it (Freire, 1972).” The trainer restated it: “Praxis is the combination of reflection and action, aimed at transforming the world.”
Not literacy. Not math. Transform the world.
Finally, the training made it clear that talk alone fails to meet the standard. “The action part is very key… without action really isn’t enough.” It was framed as both an individual and a collective effort that “takes the level of commitment from all participants.”
The training shows the complete cycle: convert the educator, equip them to deconstruct the social order, define the goal as transforming the world, and require action. The same method used in thought reform or cult indoctrination.
What DPI trained is not a method for raising reading and math achievement. James Lindsay describes the underlying project directly: “The Freirean method of ‘education’ is not an educational method at all. It is a means for politically grooming the perspective of students into a Marxist mindset, including to become activists. It is not only Marxist programming but an abject failure in all respects and has no place in American schools.” —James Lindsay, Marxification of Education, p 192
Two months later, in her first Collective Will op-ed, Underly drew a sharp public line. She stated that critical race theory “is not a subject being taught in K-12 schools” and that the honest answer to whether it was being taught was “no.” She framed broader concern as misunderstanding or simply discomfort with talking about race.
Yet the training DPI had delivered only weeks earlier did not use the formal academic label “critical race theory.” It used the operational language of critical pedagogy: personal conversion until educators “can no longer remain as they were,” the professional skill of “deconstructing existing social order,” and the explicit goal of praxis — “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”
The public statement denied a university theory. The internal training taught the applied method. That is the distinction. One is a carefully drawn boundary around a label. The other is the content educators were actually being trained to practice.
In the same op-ed, she wrote: “At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.” I believe we have the collective will. And: “I want our children, mine included, to know what systemic racism is because they will be more equipped to make our state and our nation not systemically racist.”
These training materials were not an outlier. They sit inside a longer pattern of DPI materials that treat equity as the operating system rather than one concern among many. The agency’s own mission statement still speaks of “equitable, transformative” educational experiences. The Freire training simply made the underlying theory explicit.
Wisconsin’s academic results have not improved under this race-conscious framework applied over the last 16 years. The state continues to post some of the widest Black-White achievement gaps in the nation. Fourth-grade reading gaps remain near 45 points on NAEP. Tens of thousands of children in the earliest grades still read below grade level.
Under Freire’s method, conventional literacy is not the goal. True literacy is political literacy — forming students who can read the language of political activism in order to transform the world.
The friction Wisconsin parents are feeling is real. While parents send their children to school to learn to read, write, and make a better life for themselves, DPI trains teachers that the higher purpose is to transform the world. It’s important to remember DPI also lowered state reading standards in a controversial retreat in Wisconsin Dells. That decision raises a direct question: which definition of literacy actually matters to DPI and to Underly — the conventional ability to read, or the political literacy Freire described?
