There are bright spots on Milwaukee school scene
But they aren’t enough, and highlight contrast
After spending some time with the newly-released numbers on enrollment and test scores for Milwaukee and all of Wisconsin, I needed to find a bright spot.
So I went to the dedication ceremony Friday for the new, $30 million high school addition to the Hmong American Peace Academy on the northwest side. Not only is the building a bright spot, but, more important, HAPA is a bright spot.
Started with 200 students in rented space on the south side in 2004, it now has almost 1,800 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Student performance is consistently well above the city average. The academic climate is solid and warm. In a city with so much instability in student enrollment, turnover from year to year at HAPA is close to zero. On every front – now including the new addition – it is clear that HAPA is serious about its slogan: Forever Forward.
There are other bright spots in Milwaukee. You can spot them in the new trove of data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. They have steady or growing enrollment and – despite the pandemic – pretty good to very good scores
Some of them are relative newcomers: Milwaukee Public Schools' Reagan High; the Carmen charter schools; the big and rising Saint Augustine Prep on the south side: the four Milwaukee College Prep schools on the north side; Bruce Guadalupe on the south side; Cristo Rey Jesuit High School on the south side. I apologize to other good schools that I don't have room to name.
But all this makes the contrast with the bigger picture of Milwaukee education more concerning.
Here are several important themes that emerge from the new data, as well as from the new census:
Fewer children in the city. John
Johnson, the research fellow at Marquette Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, found important insights in the new census figures. “Practically all of Milwaukee's population decline in the 2020 census came among children,” he said. “The under-18 population dropped by 16,887 from 2010 to 2020, while the adult population fell by just 727.”
This carries important long-term implications for schools of all kinds in the city. It also carries broad implications for the Milwaukee of the future.
Fewer Milwaukee children in school. Obviously, this pairs with the city's census decline. I drew together enrollment figures from DPI and MPS and came up with 112,948 Milwaukee children getting publicly-funded education in the official attendance counts in September. Eight years ago, the total was 120,805. The decline has been accelerating during the pandemic period. The figure two years ago was 117,949.
MPS has borne the brunt of this. Enrollment in the main body of MPS schools has declined steadily for years. But that has accelerated, with a decline of almost 4,000 students in two years. Some schools (including some of those bright spots) have seen steady enrollment. But a long list of MPS schools have had serious to very serious enrollment drops.
In the overall picture of enrollment by types of schools, there was less change from two years ago than I expected. In short, MPS enrolled 54% of all publiclyfunded students this year, down one percentage point from September 2019. The total number of students using vouchers to attend private schools has been steady at a little under 29,000, but the voucher portion of the total has increased in two years by one percentage point to 25.5%.
About 16,200 students, 14.4% of the total, are enrolled in charter schools that (like HAPA) run pretty much independently. And the number of Milwaukee children using the state's open enrollment law to attend public schools outside the city has been steady at a little over 5,000, about 5% of the total.
Fewer children in public schools in the state. The statewide public school enrollment picture also raises issues. Public school enrollment this year was down across Wisconsin by less than 1%, but was down 3% in the prior year. And it is down more than 38,000 (from 852,180 to 814,101) from four years ago. That's a drop of more than 4%. Increases in voucher use statewide explain a hunk of the public school decline. Downturns in proficiency levels. It's tricky to figure out what to make of the freshly-released statewide standardized test scores from last spring because so many students didn't take the tests due to the pandemic. Statewide, around 15% of students didn't participate. In MPS, the figure was more than 50% and, in some schools, it was much higher than that.
Among the students who did take tests, the results were substantially weaker than two years earlier (there were no tests given in 2020). For MPS as a whole, the results were just plain bad. For example, including in the total the students who didn't test, only 7% of third through eighth graders were rated proficient or advanced in reading and language arts. For math, the figure was 4%. Of course there's no way to know how students who didn't test would have done.
It is inescapable to say that the impact overall on MPS students of the pandemic and policies related to learning during that period was sharply negative. MPS students went without inperson learning for at least a year and the results show what that yielded. How to weigh that against the health issues through that period is not something I'm qualified to do.
ACT college entrance exam test scores for MPS students were also weaker last spring. Combine that with the decline in the number of filling out the FAFSA forms that are central to getting financial aid for college and you have a troubling picture for the overall college-readiness prospects of Milwaukee students.
That brings me back to the academic bright spots in the city. They exist. They were impacted by the pandemic, but in general persisted in educating kids and were more successful than a lot of other schools.
Why don't we have more bright spots? Why aren't more schools picking up on what is being done at those schools? Great praise for HAPA and other bright spots, but why do they stand out so much from the school scene overall?
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.