Tony Evers spent most of his entire adult life in Wisconsin schools as a teacher, principal, superintendent, three-term State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and finally governor. He looked at the state’s stubborn achievement gaps, especially the glaring Black-White disparities that consistently ranked Wisconsin near the bottom nationally, and made closing them his life’s mission.
What he built instead was something else entirely: a full-scale, decades-long commitment to Educational Equity; the beating heart of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). What followed was a reckless abandonment of merit, excellence, and basic common sense in pursuit of an educational utopia that never arrived.
In 2009, DPI’s Cabinet sat through “Courageous Conversations” race training from the Pacific Education Group. A State Equity Leadership Team launched in 2010. The 2011 Disproportionality Technical Assistance Network targeted racial imbalances in special education. By 2013, Evers appointed Dr. Demond Means to lead the Promoting Excellence for All (PEFA) Task Force. The 2014 PEFA report became the blueprint: color-conscious strategies, implicit-bias training, and race-based equity practices across the board.
DPI rolled out the Model to Inform Culturally Responsive Practices, mandatory “Embracing Equity” staff training that openly attacked color-blindness, and the PEFA eCourse training educators to become “race-conscious.”
That utopia still hadn’t shown up. So the demand became more coaching, more money, more systems… always more not better. Social-emotional learning, mental health initiatives, “disparities” in discipline and every other real-world problem became another reason to double down on equity. The work turned into the familiar pattern: oppressed versus oppressor struggle sessions and frantic attempts to socially engineer equal outcomes. It became a race to the bottom.
All of it, every mission directive, every training, every dollar, was funneled through the equity lens. When early results didn’t close the gaps, Evers faced a choice. He chose to double down.
As president of the Council of Chief State School Officers (2016–2017), he made equity his national platform. The resulting “Leading for Equity” report gave Wisconsin, and every state chief, a 10-commitment playbook: agency culture transformation, new superintendent and principal pipelines through the “Big 5” Urban Leadership Institute, equity-aligned data and funding, and full use of the Every Student Succeeds Act.
As governor, he did it again. Executive Order #59 in 2019 ordered every state agency — including DPI — to formally adopt equity and inclusion plans with measurable goals and mandatory training. After he left DPI, his successors kept the faith. The 2021–2023 and 2024–2026 Equity & Inclusion Plans doubled down once more.
Still no utopia. So the list of things that supposedly needed “reimagining” grew: talented and gifted programs, equitable-multi tiered systems of support, even calibrated disciplinary systems. Teachers started reporting violence in classrooms and significant numbers began leaving the profession. Restorative justice circles replaced consequences. All because the equity framework wasn’t delivering and never would.
DPI’s own strategic documents prove the shift. The agency’s current mission statement reads: “To advance equitable, transformative, and sustainable educational experiences…” Equity was declared “essential to all our tasks.” That framing, locked in during Evers’ superintendency and reaffirmed under Superintendent Jill Underly in the 2024–2029 Strategic Plan, turned race-conscious ideology into the filter for nearly every decision.
For more than fifteen years, DPI poured time and resources into implicit-bias training, culturally responsive frameworks, identity-focused leadership pipelines, and equity-aligned systems. The academic results? Wisconsin still owns some of the widest Black-White achievement gaps in the country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In 2024, Black fourth-graders trailed White peers by 45 points in reading and 47 in math. Black eighth-graders trailed by 39 in reading and 50 in math. On the state Forward Exam, roughly 61% of White students are proficient in English language arts compared to just 18% of Black students. More than 97,000 children in grades 4K–3 are reading below grade level. The gaps did not close. They barely budged.
The human cost is measured in something children never get back: time. Evidence-based reading instruction, timely interventions, and high expectations for every single student were pushed aside for a systemic race-conscious lens. An entire generation of Wisconsin kids paid the price in lost educational opportunity.
Even as governor, Evers kept writing blank checks. In the 2023 budget, he used his partial veto pen to turn a temporary $325 per-pupil revenue limit increase into a permanent one — stretching it all the way to the year 2425. One stroke of the pen locked generations of Wisconsin taxpayers into funding the very system whose mission had been redefined around equity.
An $8 million special-education coaching grant was sacrificed and rejected from the federal government because DPI’s own framework demanded coaches address “white supremacy” and “dismantle” its effects. The refusal to remove the equity lens was a higher priority than $8 million dollars in funding.
Tony Evers was not malicious. He was a lifelong educator who genuinely believed DEI was the answer. He built a documented, sustained institutional mission around that belief and used the full power of his office to fund it for the next four centuries. That was a powerful mistake that will forever memorialize his educational career. A career that diverted focus, training, and financial resources away from the practical, evidence-based basics struggling children need most.
It’s time for a new mission.
