Reporting out this month from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that Milwaukee Public Schools doesn't track or analyze exit surveys completed by staff when they leave.
This leaves large blind spots for district leaders about why people are dissatisfied with their jobs and how the district can improve.
Rory Linnane, an education reporter at the Journal Sentinel and an O'Brien fellow, reviewed 887 handwritten exit surveys from MPS staff along with Marquette University students and contributing reporters Gabriel Sisarica and Chesnie Wardell.
They found common threads.
"A lot of staff talked about lack of support and having increasingly high workloads in their jobs," Linnane says.
MPS staff who left between 2021 and 2024 cited burnout, exhaustion and even concerns about their physical safety while at school. Staff reported spending hours of their days covering other jobs left empty, breaking up fights and dealing with class sizes that were far too large.
Their feedback, which was optional to leave and not anonymous, became a valuable trove of data left mostly unused by the school district.
Linnane found that human resources professionals inside MPS would review the exit surveys and report findings that stood out to school principals. The data never made its way to the school board of directors or was meaningfully analyzed.
"You have to understand why people are leaving in order to have a good retention strategy," she says.
Linnane spoke with WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal about her reporting, what she and her team found and how MPS leaders promise to change.
