The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is asking for billions more in school funding. The pitch is familiar: the funding formula is broken, districts need predictable money, and the answer is for more dollars.
Wisconsin’s real education crisis runs through what is actually happening with our students.
Since 2010, Wisconsin schools lost 80,000 students. Public school enrollment dropped 9.2 percent. Sixty-eight of Wisconsin’s 72 counties saw students decline. The state’s birth rate fell, families moved, and the math is inescapable: fewer children attending school.
Since 2010, Wisconsin lost 80,000 students.
During those same years, per-pupil spending climbed to $17,400 in 2023-24, exceeding the previous peak set in 2010. Schools received more money per student even as they served fewer students. By any rational measure, this should have produced better results. Stronger teaching. More attention to each child. Higher achievement.
Instead, Wisconsin’s test scores fell. Fourth-grade reading proficiency dropped from 36 percent in 2019 to 31 percent in 2024. The state’s fourth graders now score worse than they ever have on this measure. Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap remains the worst in the nation. In Milwaukee, nearly 70 percent of fourth graders scored below basic on national assessments, meaning they lack even partial mastery of grade-level skills.
Meanwhile, school staffing increased 7 percent while the student population shrank by 9.2 percent. Wisconsin added thousands of teachers and staff as classrooms emptied. More adults. Fewer children. Declining achievement. Wisconsin has spent more per student while shrinking its student population and producing worse results. The constraint is not money. The constraint is what schools choose to do with it.
The Department of Public Instruction’s most recent response, outside of asking for even more money, was to lower standards. In 2023-24, it changed how the Forward Exam is scored and what counts as proficiency. Not because students suddenly learned more. Because the bar was lowered. The appearance of success replaced the fact of it.
Asking Wisconsin taxpayers to send more money into a system that serves fewer students, produces declining results while simultaneously lowering the standards used to measure success is asking them to subsidize failure and relabel it as progress.
Asking Wisconsin taxpayers to send more money into a system that serves fewer students, produces declining results while simultaneously lowering the standards used to measure success is asking them to subsidize failure and relabel it as progress.
School districts have a legitimate case about rising costs. That’s real. Inflation happens. Materials cost more. But a state’s response to that reality should not be a blank check. It should demand accountability.
A genuine fix to Wisconsin’s school funding would tie new resources to measurable gains in student achievement. It would require districts to explain why they’re hiring more staff while serving fewer students and producing worse results. It would demand that schools hit specific literacy and math benchmarks before accessing additional state dollars. It would end the practice of lowering achievement thresholds to hide stagnation.
Wisconsin students are falling further behind. They’re losing ground in reading and math. The achievement gap between students of different races is widening. These are the actual problems. Sending more money to institutions that can’t solve them doesn’t solve anything. It enables them.
If the Department of Public Instruction wants billions more from Wisconsin taxpayers, it should start by answering a single question: What changed about how you’ll spend this money that would produce different results than the billions already sent your way?
That’s the conversation worth having, because the success of the next generation, and the generation after that, are on the line. Wisconsin needs to get serious, and quickly, about solving our education crisis.
