This article takes aim at Governor Tony Evers’ record and messaging on education, his decision to relabel the Capitol’s holiday tree, and the broader decline and scandals within Wisconsin’s public school system under his watch.
I was genuinely relieved to hear Governor Tony Evers said he won’t seek reelection next year. He rarely came off like the kind of executive who ran the show himself, and conservative chatter even attributes much of the day-to-day direction to his chief of staff, Maggie Gau. Given Evers’ heavy-handed COVID policies that the state Supreme Court rebuked, that rumor fits a broader pattern of weak public leadership cloaked in overreach.
Beyond managerial flubs, Evers has pushed cultural changes that many find alarming. He floated replacing the words “women” and “mother” with the phrase “inseminated persons,” and resisted measures intended to shield female athletes from trans participation. He also used the governor’s line-item veto in a way that saddled taxpayers with decades of additional obligations to prop up struggling public schools.
Evers recently unveiled the seasonal display at the Capitol Rotunda, and his social post about the ceremony is revealing in its choice of language. He refers to it only as “the tree” and instead calls it the “Learning Tree,” which comes off as an awkward attempt to sanitize tradition for the sake of optics.
Dropping the simple name “Christmas tree” for a politically neutral label does not fool anyone who watches what passes for symbolism in state government. Rebranding a seasonal icon while the basic performance metrics for schools crater feels out of touch, not clever. The choice to avoid straightforward language highlights a leadership more attentive to appearances than outcomes.
Wisconsin has an elected Superintendent of Public Instruction whose job is to keep public schools accountable, and Evers himself held that post for nearly two decades before becoming governor in 2019. That long tenure should have translated into steady progress and measurable gains in classrooms. Instead, it’s hard to point to any sustained turnaround during his time in state education leadership.
Consider the numbers: testing in 2015 showed roughly 43 percent of students proficient in both reading and math. Scores fell to about 34 percent during the COVID school years of 2020-2021 and have only inched upward to near 47 percent more recently. For perspective, the old WKCE test in 2001 reported roughly 70 percent proficiency, so the trajectory under current leadership is troubling.
At least a third of Wisconsin students still cannot read at grade level, and students in Milwaukee Public Schools lag at the bottom nationally in both reading and math. In the face of those results, Evers vetoed a bill aimed at raising educational standards, and he publicly vowed to fight proposals to dismantle the Department of Education, calling such efforts “sell out our kids.” That rhetoric sounds protective, but the policy choices that followed did not move outcomes in the right direction.
Compounding low scores, the Department of Public Instruction was implicated in a recent report showing hundreds of state educators were investigated for sexual misconduct while employed, and many of those individuals were able to keep their licenses and remain in classrooms. When investigations fail to lead to meaningful accountability, public trust and student safety suffer in ways that test scores alone cannot capture.
There are dedicated teachers doing the hard work of instruction and support across Wisconsin, and they deserve recognition and resources. Yet the combination of declining achievement, policy resistance to higher standards, and mishandled misconduct cases points to systemic failure. At this point, an honest apology and a willingness to let new leadership take over would be the clearest signal that the state intends to put students first.
