Jill Underly used her sixth State of Education address Thursday to tell Wisconsin the schools, teachers, and students are fine. The problem, she said from the Capitol rotunda, is, of course, the Republican legislature.
“Our schools are not the problem. Our teachers are not the problem. Our students are not the problem,” the state superintendent said. “The problem is we have asked them to carry the weight of decades of political decisions.” She called the funding formula stagnant and inequitable. More than 90 percent of districts have gone to referendum in nine years. She accused lawmakers of steering public dollars into “unaccountable” private choice schools. She asked voters to pick “pro-public school, pro-child and pro-Wisconsin” leaders this fall and promised a bigger DPI budget request in November.
What she did not put in the speech is the record her department actually owns.
In a press release before the speech, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce asked Underly to answer for Wisconsin’s failing schools. Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin students are below grade level in math. Seven in 10 are below grade level in reading. DPI’s own report cards still rate 94 percent of schools as meeting or exceeding expectations. Taxpayers already spend about $18,600 to $19,000 per pupil, more than half again what it costs to attend UW-Madison this year, and spending ticked up another $154 per student last year, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Underly’s answer was another speech about inflation and referendums. She did not explain how a system that already spends that much, and grades itself an A, needs a new political class before it will teach third-graders to read.
Parents have seen this movie. In 2024, Underly’s DPI lowered Forward Exam cut scores and replaced NAEP-aligned labels with softer ones: “meeting,” “approaching,” “developing.” Students who looked behind under the old yardstick suddenly appeared closer to fine. Even Gov. Tony Evers, a former superintendent who wrote the old benchmarks, called the change a mistake. Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin’s Megan Novak said after Thursday’s address that families do not need another speech. They need a bar that does not move when scores are ugly. Underly did not mention NAEP, the Black-White achievement gap she once called painful, or the Forward Exam at all.
She also skipped the part of her job meant to keep dangerous adults out of classrooms. DPI is sitting on roughly 150 open educator-misconduct investigations and 60 community complaints. The department’s 2027-29 budget request admits one permanent paralegal and one limited-term employee cannot reduce the pile. Cap Times reporting last year showed how surrendered licenses and slow casework can leave a path back into schools. Underly is asking for two more full-time staffers. She did not explain to her audience why that backlog exists on her watch.
Thursday afternoon, NBC15’s Vanessa Kjeldsen asked a narrower question. DPI’s public license database lists revocations but not the allegations. Why not? Underly said, “I think that that’s coming.” Minutes later her communications director, Chris Bucher, walked it back: legal limits on what can be posted, and the site as built already meets the statute. They are “discussing” categories. This is not a speech problem. It is a parent who cannot see whether the teacher down the hall lost a license for paperwork or for a child.
Underly framed November as a loyalty test. Anyone who voted against her preferred funding, mental-health lines, 4K, or child care is, in her telling, against children. The Journal Sentinel dutifully carried the “pro-public school leaders” headline. Choice families paying taxes into a system their kids left, and districts that keep passing referendums while proficiency stays flat, got the retreaded talking point about unaccountable private schools. The department that rewrote the scoreboard and cannot clear a misconduct docket got the benefit of the doubt.
Wisconsin has a results shortage that starts in K-12 and now shows up on college campuses. Wisconsin still posts the widest Black-White achievement gap in the country. Milwaukee Public Schools ranks among the four worst large urban districts on that same national exam, alongside Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore.
Nearly one in six Fall 2025 freshmen, 4,716 students, needed developmental math before they could take a credit-bearing course. About 6 percent needed developmental English. At UW-Milwaukee, the math remediation rate has run as high as 59 percent. The system’s answer has been to treat the pipeline as the problem, not the preparation: SAT and ACT requirements are on the way out for good.
Underly can call on the next governor and the next Legislature for whatever she wants. Until DPI posts why teachers are facing misconduct, clears the backlog, and focuses on improving student achievement, the state of public education will never be addressed.
