Voters Didn’t Get It Wright

Primary voters missed a good chance to improve education in Wisconsin.

On Tuesday they eliminated by far the best of three candidates to serve the next four years as state Superintendent of Public Instruction. That candidate was Sauk Prairie Superintendent of Schools Jeff Wright.

Wright was endorsed by the Wisconsin School Administrators and the teachers union in Middleton-Cross Plains. He would have been endorsed by the state teachers union if WEAC’s leadership hadn’t blocked it. Their PAC recommended they endorse Wright, but that was never confirmed by top brass.

It’s remarkable that the teachers union would not endorse an incumbent State Superintendent that they had supported last time and one that was endorsed by the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s probably because of those two facts that WEAC leadership wouldn’t go along with the recommendation of their political arm.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: being backed by teachers unions isn’t necessarily a good thing. But, as noted above, it does indicate a great deal of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, Jill Underly. Underly has taken criticism from both me and also from people and groups that matter.

Those criticisms are in three areas. She’s a bad communicator, she’s too partisan and she juiced test scores to make her performance look better. Wright hit her on all three. He pointed out, correctly, that her change to test scores made it look like more students were performing at a proficient level than actually were and that it made it virtually impossible to track progress — or more to the point, the lack of it — from previous years.

Even Gov. Tony Evers, a former DPI chief himself, disagreed with Underly on this. And that brings up her poor communication skills. Evers was caught off guard by the changes. She didn’t let the governor know they were coming, nor did she have a very inclusive process in adopting the new standards. Along these lines, she has also come in for criticism from members of her own DPI team for creating a closed, unresponsive and chaotic atmosphere. One former member of that team went on the record with the Wisconsin Examiner on that point while another communicated with me directly about it, but doesn’t want to go public for fear of reprisal.

Which brings us to the last criticism. Underly is too partisan and can’t work with the Republicans who control the Legislature. When Underly proposed that all $4 billion of the state surplus be spent on public schools, Speaker Robin Vos just shrugged. By contrast, Wright has worked successfully in Sauk, one of the most purple parts of the state.

Here’s what he said in that Examiner story: “We may not want the exact same way to get there, but if we’re not in this room with each other talking about how we could accomplish shared goals, it makes it easier to be really political and to say outlandish things about the other side and to demonize them when there probably is some point of agreement if we just forced ourselves to be in the same room, and that’s how we’ve led in Sauk Prairie. All the projects that I just listed, my school board voted for unanimously, but I know that they have different yard signs in front of their homes when it comes to the national election.” 

Perfect. That’s the kind of person I want not just at DPI, but all over government. (He also graduated from Harvard, but he made up for that by growing up in Stevens Point.) And yet, the voters didn’t see it. Here’s what I think happened. Underly and Wright split the Democratic vote while the Republicans were united behind the third candidate, Brittany Kinser, a school choice advocate. Wright’s campaign also seemed to be underfunded. He needed to be able to outspend Underly in order to overcome her advantage as an incumbent. And, frankly, had WEAC followed through on their endorsement they might have pulled him ahead of Underly.

Now, we’re likely to have a low-profile contest that will be caricatured as a simple choice between a public schools advocate and a voucher proponent. The state Dems wasted no time in reducing the race to that. On election night, they excreted a statement saying, “Kinser’s campaign is funded by Republican megadonors and stage-managed by a former Republican legislator because they love that Kinser has promised to drain funds from our public schools and give them to private for-profit schools… Our kids don’t need a right-wing puppet to lead our schools.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. If Wright had come through to face Underly, both would have had the same position on vouchers and so that hot button issue would have been off the table. That would have cleared the way for substantive discussions on how to measure student progress, how to improve student outcomes, how to finance our schools and how to work with a Democratic Governor and a Republican Legislature. Wright, who ran for State Assembly twice as a Democrat, could not have been dismissed as a right-wing puppet.

Personally, I’m now faced with a difficult decision in April. I will not vote for Underly. I’ll try to learn as much about Kinser as I can to see if she deserves my vote. But it’s all just not Wright.

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