In the 1990s Milwaukee was seen nationally as the epicenter of “education reform” with the establishment of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, followed by charter schools a few years later that greatly expanded options available to families.
The core premise of the parental choice movement was that our school system at the time was not serving children well. However, there is little evidence that the average child in Milwaukee receives a higher quality education today, according to a new Wisconsin Policy Forum report.
The report, titled “Roll Call: A Landscape Review of the Students, Financing, and Performance of Milwaukee's K-12 Schools,” examines Milwaukee's traditional public, charter schools within and outside of Milwaukee Public Schools and private school choice sectors. The report looks at trends in enrollment, demographics, finances, student outcomes and much more 30 years out from when some of the major systemic changes were established.
One of the first pieces of data that Wisconsin Policy Forum Deputy Research Director Sara Shaw points to is the decline of enrollment across the board. "The number of youth under the age of of 18 in Milwaukee has dropped by 27%," she notes. "So there's been some real demographic shifts and we see that in the schools as well. So it's declining birth rates and net migration that get us this over all 27% decline, but we don't see the school sectors feeling the impact of that decline evenly."
Traditional Milwaukee Public Schools are bearing the brunt of enrollment decline thus far, with enrollment declining by a third from 2006 to 2024. However, charter school enrollment more than doubled in the same time period and private choice participation increased by 90%, according to Shaw.
She also notes that the level of need in Milwaukee increases across all three sectors, resulting in very similar demographics in terms of the students they serve.
"We have at least 90% students of color, ... we have at least 75% of students being classified as economically disadvantaged, we have increasing percentages of English learners between 12 and 15% depending on the sector," explains Shaw. "So these are all kind of those markers of greater diversity in our schools, which brings a lot of strengths, and also brings more barriers for our traditional school system regardless of sector to really be making sure that they're serving kids well."
Another focus of the report is student distribution and how that impacts funding. Shaw says, “As the overall youth enrollment does decline in Milwaukee, we may start seeing it hit the other sectors as well and certainly it means that at minimum there's more competition for a smaller pie of kids to be able to serve. So on a per pupil basis, whether it's our MPS schools, our charter schools or our private schools, everyone is tracking their enrollment because of [the] dollars following the kid."
Different levels of funding from the state and federal levels are designated for students living in poverty, students who are English learners and students with special needs. While school may get more funding based on student needs, Shaw says, "the amount of money they're receiving is far below the amount that they actually need to be able to educate those children well."
While the report shows that the sectors have grown to be demographically similar, one major exception according to Shaw is students with disabilities.
"So, the charter schools are educating in their student body about 11% of students with disabilities. MPS is up at 20%. And so, in the entire traditional MPs student body, 20% of kids have an identified disability and that the district then has the mandate legally to serve," she says. "That does create challenges for MPS or for any of our charter schools that are serving at also a high percentage. Because at least at the state level, the underfunding there is at 30% — meaning that for every dollar that a district is spending on a student special needs they're only receiving 30 cents on that back."
"The evidence that we do have doesn't suggest that the kind of structural changes that we made to the system resulted in structural changes to outcomes."
As enrollment declines amid uneven distribution, Shaw notes that financial challenges will remain and even grow further — especially as the ratio of students across various school buildings remains uneven.
"There was a proliferation of school buildings when all of these sectors were kind of taking off and we get more publicly funded buildings on the books, but then we get this big enrollment decline and the number of school buildings has really not moved that much even as the number of kids had dropped. So that's stretching the available number of dollars across this pretty large quantity of school buildings, which then lowers the amount of funding per school, lowers the amount of funding per student at each school and is probably not going to be that easily resolved because it's not spread evenly across the city.”
Shaw notes that figuring out how to manage a potential right-sizing will be difficult because you're dealing with generational, geographic and community school cultures. "There's just so much in there and yet the current situation looks increasingly untenable for being able to provide adequate resources for students at all of these different school buildings," she says.
While there have been pockets of progress in student performance, Shaw says the pandemic halted much of it.
"There were some signs that there were schools that were really figuring out how to best serve kids and that, I think, gives us the option of thinking of, 'Well can we scale some of those solutions to elsewhere in the city?' The pandemic, like in so many other places, really hurt that progress and some case stalled it in other cases reversed it," she notes.
In 2022, 7% of traditional MPS public and charter schools 8th graders were proficient in math, which is the same percentage of students that saw seen in 2009. We stand out nationally for our childhood poverty rates, the gap in outcomes between white and Black students on virtually any measure and low test scores, Shaw says.
"The gap between Milwaukee and other districts nationally was widening over time in a way that didn't track with how the child poverty rate was changing," says Shaws. "So we do think that Milwaukee starts further behind the starting line than other places but also doesn't seem to be growing as much as it could if we look at where other places are."
She admits that this detailed report is filled with a lot of discouraging and sobering stats. "I know for me, personally, so I came into this work for the first time in about 14 years ago, and it has been dispiriting to say the least of how little has changed,” says Shaw.
Shaw says the Wisconsin Policy Forum is actively working on a second phase that will allow them to speak with leaders of schools in Milwaukee that seem to be beating the odds to see if those lessons can translate to other schools. "But we also can't start from a place of, 'Well, nothing can ever work here,' because what's happening here right now is unacceptable."
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