In 2019, Jesse Doiron was a new teacher in Milwaukee.
He was working one-on-one with struggling kids to help them catch up. But he didn’t feel like the system was moving to close the achievement gap between Black and white students.
He wrote in to WUWM’s Beats Me series asking for an examination of that gap.
“My question was: Milwaukee had the largest achievement gap between Black and white students in the United States," he says. "Is there political will to fix this large issue?”
It’s been seven years since Doiron sent in his question. Since then, it's clear that the the achievement gap — also known as the opportunity gap — had only gotten worse.
In 2019, Black fourth graders in Wisconsin scored 39 points lower than their white peers on national reading assessments. The gap was the same for eighth grade readers, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress.
By 2024, that achievement gap had widened to 45 points. The gap for eighth graders remained the same at 39 points.
Why does the racial achievement gap exist in Milwaukee?
To understand why the achievement gap exists in the first place, it helps to look backwards first.
James Nelsen is a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher and a historian who wrote the book "Educating Milwaukee" on how Milwaukee’s schools attempted to desegregate.
“Milwaukee is, of course, one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. And it's not just racially segregated, it's also economically segregated," he says.
The economic segregation means that there’s a higher rate of poverty among Black families in Milwaukee, which can result in compounding challenges.
Students may struggle with evictions or unstable housing, deal with the impacts of gun violence, have difficulties getting to school or parents who work several jobs and may not be able to assist with schoolwork.
Dr. James Ferguson is on the Milwaukee School Board. He represents the predominately Black central part of the city, and explains the historical under-resourcing of Black neighborhoods creates more difficult learning environments for students.
Audrey Nowakowski: Last week, we brought you a conversation with Dr. Brenda Cassellius, the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. The conversation was about whether there is political will to solve the achievement gap between Black and white students in the Milwaukee area.
Brenda Cassellius: I've been in Milwaukee now for about a year and a half, and there's been a tremendous outpouring of support for tackling the underachievement in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Audrey Nowakowski: Today, we'd like to bring you a different viewpoint, that of MPS Board of Directors Vice President Dr. James Ferguson. While he and the superintendent have the same employer, they don't agree on whether there's political will to address Milwaukee's achievement gap. Here's Board Director Ferguson's conversation with WUWM Education Reporter Katherine Kokal.
Katherine Kokal: So we'll just start by posing the question that the listener asked to WUWM to you. The listener said, "Milwaukee has the largest achievement gap between Black and white students in the United States. Is there political will to fix this large issue?"
James Ferguson: Honestly, I have to say no. And the reason I say no is because I think black males in particular are one of the most neglected groups in our city. I think, if the case were the same for, like, white male students, you would see coalitions forming around this particular issue in order to lift them up. And unfortunately, that just hasn't been the case when it comes to Back males. And it's the same when it comes to violence. Of course, Black males are the number one group most likely to be killed by gun violence. As a matter of fact, you reached out to me because I've voiced this on the board floor multiple times, about how many more Black male students do we have to lose in our district before we declare it a state of emergency? And I'll even go even further to say it's something that everyone in this city is aware of. It's like the elephant in the room, right? There's no one around who is not aware of this issue, yet we continue to pass the buck on it. Nobody takes the personal accountability for the condition of Black males in this city. In particular, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to Milwaukee Public Schools, there's that same thing. And again, I will continue to elevate that voice, not just because I'm a Black male myself, but because I believe that, as a community leader, I have a moral imperative to continue raising and to continue pushing this important issue.
Katherine Kokal: And I just want to share, for listeners who may not be aware, you represent District 4 on the School Board of Directors, and that is kind of the central part of our city. Central goes up to Keith Avenue. Can you talk a little bit about how this gap shows up in your district specifically?
James Ferguson: Absolutely. So it's no secret that District 4, it kind of leads the districts when it comes to things that we don't like to talk about. Like, it's the poorest district. It's the district with the lowest academic achievement for African-American males. It is the district with the least amount of opportunity for African American males, and any other student for that matter. So District 4, prior to me coming to this board, has been that district where, because it's the blackest and the poorest district in Milwaukee Public Schools, it's the district that is notoriously disinvested in. It's the district that's notoriously neglected. And I'm grateful that my colleagues on the board of directors, I didn't have to do a whole lot of arm twisting. They just understood the plight when I raised this, and I continue to raise it. But to your point and to your question, how does this disparity show up in District 4? It shows up with, we have this problem where a lot of teachers don't wanna teach in District 4. And because we allow teachers to determine where they wanna teach at, District 4 remains the district that leads Milwaukee Public Schools and the number of schools with teacher vacancies. No district has a higher teacher vacancy issue than District 4, I think, because the same issue is also home to some of the oldest schools in Milwaukee Public Schools as well. We lead the district with old buildings, without air conditioning, that also need investment. District 4 was hit very hard with the lead poisoning crisis. Many of my buildings in District 4 were hotbeds for lead poisoning. Again, we addressed the issue, but I think if circumstances were different, you'll see a different response to the district.
Katherine Kokal: If you're just joining us today, we're talking with MPS Board Director James Ferguson. We're talking about the achievement gap between white and Black students. I want to take a step back for a minute to talk about why this exists. I interviewed several people, from classroom teachers to the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and education advocacy organizations. Although they represented different points on the political spectrum, several of them pointed to poverty in Milwaukee as the root cause of this achievement gap. I will mention that the superintendent kind of pushed back against that. She said she didn't want to use poverty as an excuse for results like this. What do you think causes this achievement gap?
James Ferguson: Yes, it's no doubt. And I agree with the superintendent. I don't want to use poverty as an excuse. However, it is not an excuse, it just... You're just understanding the issue. I was privileged to be in some high-level briefings about the effects of lead on student behavior and academic achievement, which, we know that was a major issue in Milwaukee public schools just this past year. The effects, the brain science, the neuroscience connected to lead poisoning, elevated lead levels, is absolutely staggering. But I think we need to look even deeper and look at the effects, the neuroscientific effects of trauma on students. That's just something that distinguishes the students in District 4 from, let's say, students in predominantly white districts. The levels of trauma that they've been exposed to, I think, is much more acute than students in a predominantly white district.
Katherine Kokal: Yeah, thank you. I want to ask, what are specific examples of things that can work in your eyes to close this gap and help students perform better and help them learn better?
James Ferguson: Well, one thing that I'm very proud of, this year, we've been able to kind of resurrect, albeit not at the level that it needs to be resurrected, but the community school model. The community schools model was a model where it was all hands on deck. You know, that was the political scene, public safety, Children and Family Services, Milwaukee Public Schools, SNAP benefits, all of these different entities coming together and working cooperatively to lift up, in this case, a certain school. But when we saw this model at work and when it was done right, we saw kids doing better academically. The other thing is there's this thing called the AGR program that we've been participating in as a district, the Achievement Gap Reduction Program. What we know is detrimental to this goal of seeing increased performance academically among students, what we know as what works against that is when we ignore, when we ignored the fact that certain groups have special needs. When we treat every student the same without regard to their circumstances, their unique circumstances or their unique needs, what we see is that gap continue to widen. But when we specifically focus in and lean into and not shy away from, but lean into these groups that are underperforming or, historically, that are not are not proficient. When we lean into it and we develop, when we develop programming specifically around the achievement of that group, we see the group increases. We just finished the year-end report for the Achievement Gap Reduction Program. The data is very positive, and it speaks very clearly that when we leaned into, instead of shying away from, we actually see better outcomes. And everybody is working in concert, our ducks are in a row, and we're all rowing in the same direction. And when that happens, when you see that type of cross collaboration, and that when we're actually laser-focused on a certain thing, we see the needle move forward. And that's why I will continue to elevate this story, elevate these voices, because I know that the enemy of progress is silence.
Katherine Kokal: Director Ferguson, thank you so much for talking to me about this today. It's really important. I appreciate it.
James Ferguson: Thank you for having me. It's an honor, and I appreciate you for bringing a microphone to this important issue.
Audrey Nowakowski: Dr. James Ferguson is the Vice President of the MPS Board of Directors. He spoke with WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal. You can listen to Katherine's story with more voices and viewpoints on the racial achievement gap at wuwm.com.
Pair that with closing schools and long commutes for students, and Ferguson says the system has been designed to let them down.
Asked whether he thinks there’s political will in Milwaukee to change this, Ferguson said “Honestly, I have to say no."
"The reason I say no is because I think Black males in particular are one of the most neglected, and one of the most neglected groups in our city," he says. "I think if the case were the same for white male students, you would see coalitions forming around this particular issue in order to lift them up. And unfortunately, that just hasn't been the case when it comes to Black males.”
It's worth mentioning that MPS participates in the Achievement Gap Reduction program offered by the state Department of Public Instruction.
It also hosts a collection of chapters of the Black and Latino Male Achievement program, although budget cuts this year will result in consolidation of some staff into one central equity office.
Has Milwaukee accepted the racial achievement gap as 'just the way things are?'
Colleston Morgan, executive director of the pro-school choice and charter group City Forward Collective, says that too many people have resigned themselves to the status quo in Milwaukee.
“I think that we have accepted a reality in our city for far too long that this is just the way things are, or perhaps the way things have to be," Morgan says.
He rejects that. Morgan says that the achievement gap is fueled by small decisions year after year, such as recent failures by the state Department of Public Instruction to fund the work of the Milwaukee Reading Coalition, and Milwaukee Public Schools’ hesitancy to close under enrolled schools.
Morgan’s organization released a report earlier this year that found that Milwaukee Public Schools serve 57% of all the Black students in Wisconsin. Most live or attend schools on the city’s northwest side.
"Twenty-two of the 50 lowest performing schools are on the north side of Milwaukee," Morgan says. "Seventeen of those are Milwaukee public schools, but that means that we've got schools that are not Milwaukee public schools that are also sitting on that bottom 50 list."
"We can't solve these challenges just by looking to Milwaukee Public Schools, and we can't solve these challenges without Milwaukee Public Schools," Morgan adds.
Dr. Brenda Cassellius is the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. She says that MPS offers a variety of programs meant to keep kids coming to school and supporting their learning – things like early childhood programs, intervention for students with disabilities and crisis support for families.
But Cassellius says the creation of the school choice program 36 years ago hasn’t delivered on its promises to improve outcomes for Black students. Instead, she says it’s created more instability for families and disrupted public school budgets.
“I think there needs to be a much more coordinated effort around the children of Milwaukee — regardless of what type of system you go to now that the city has chosen it — to ensure that there is a compelling political will (to address the achievement gap)," she says.
Cassellius also questioned whether the National Assessment for Educational Progress is the right mechanism to measure student achievement gaps. The assessments are given to a random sampling of students every two years.
"We use (NAEP) to make more generalized assumptions about students' learning," she says. "When you're trying to move the Black/white student achievement gap, you need to be looking individual-by-individual, school-by-school. It has to be that precise."
"What's a better measure of that performance is that student's work on course assessments that are given by the teacher to really gauge whether they're making progress toward the grade-level standards," she says.
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Audrey Nowakowski: In the last few decades, the gap between how white and Black students perform on tests has been narrowing on the national level. But here in Milwaukee, 2024 data shows that we had the largest racial achievement gap in the country. That year, Black fourth graders in Wisconsin scored 45 points lower than their white peers on national reading assessments. The gap was 39 points for eighth grade readers. A listener wrote into our Beats Me series to ask, is their political will to fix that gap? WUWM education reporter, Katherine Kochal, spoke with half a dozen education leaders and teachers about that question. Today, we're bringing you one of those conversations with Dr. Brenda Cassellius, the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools.
Katherine Kokal: We will start by posing the question that the listener asked WUWM to you. The listener asked us, “Milwaukee has had the largest achievement gap between Black and white students in the United States. Is there political will to fix this issue? Where do you see political will in Milwaukee?”
Brenda Cassellius: You know, I've been in Milwaukee now for about a year and a half, and there's been a tremendous outpouring of support for tackling the underachievement in Milwaukee public schools. So I absolutely believe there's a political will. I've seen it both in our civic leaders, the mayor and the city council, as well as our philanthropic community who stepped up and provided. An opportunity with some impact funding to be able to start on the governor's operational audit. I've seen it at the state level with the governor issuing an operational audit and an academic audit, which has given us a roadmap. And I've seen it within our teachers and our principals wanting to make a difference and just hungry for us to have coherence and be able drive the system forward. And I've also seen it at the school board level, who has supported me in making transformational changes in order to bring our district into good standing financially, as well as to support an academic agenda around literacy. So I'm more of an optimist about the political will that we are pulling together here with an all hands on deck across civic, across the state. And philanthropic and at our board level with our with our teachers and our principals as well.
Katherine Kokal: Thank you. I want to take a step back for a second to talk about why this achievement gap between Black and white students exists. For this story, I interviewed several people from classroom teachers, book authors, school board directors, and education advocacy organization leaders. Although they were presented very different points on the political spectrum, many of them pointed to poverty in Milwaukee as the root cause of this achievement gap. What do you make of that?
Brenda Cassellius: Well, I absolutely believe poverty makes it more challenging for children to achieve, particularly if they're unable to access early childhood opportunities. If a parent has been, a mother has been, unable to access prenatal care and early parenting supports that have provided her support, that's where poverty can absolutely set a child up for getting behind. So I think that that matters. But we have seen an example over example where black children, children who are poor, children who have language barriers, children who we have disabilities achieve at incredible levels when provided the right opportunity, the right scaffolding, and the adults creating the conditions in which they should succeed. And so I don't use poverty as an excuse. I myself grew up to a single mother on welfare, and look where I've achieved. And I am in this business and have chosen this vocation exactly because I saw firsthand how programming and braiding and weaving together support systems from government, from civic community, from you know, local Park and Rec board and other opportunities and just having a great teacher in your classroom and how that can inspire a child and provide the right kind of support, whether it's support for your health and your nutrition or whether it’s support for after school care and activitiesm or having a great teacher in a classroom who inspires you to do your best and provide you with the right kinda support to be able to achieve. So I don't make any excuses. I think it can be done. I've seen it done. I've seen it both personally and in my own professional experience, I've seen it done. And I see school systems and schools in particular who have done it well, and who have beaten the odds against all odds when children have lacked opportunity early in their school career.
Katherine Kokal: Thank you. You talked about some of the general examples of programs that can work to help close this gap. Do you have any specific examples of what's being done in Milwaukee public schools right now to do that?
Brenda Cassellius: Well, I absolutely believe poverty makes it more challenging for children to achieve, particularly if they're unable to access early childhood opportunities. If a parent has been, a mother has been unable to access prenatal care and early parenting supports, you know, that have provided her support, that's where poverty can absolutely set a child up for getting behind. So, I think that that matters. But we have seen an example over example where black children, children who are poor, children who have language barriers, children have disabilities achieve at incredible levels when provided the right opportunity, the right scaffolding, and the adults creating the conditions in which they should succeed. And so I don't use poverty as an excuse, I myself. Grew up to a single mother on welfare, and look where I've achieved. And I am in this business and have chosen this vocation exactly because I saw firsthand how programming and braiding and weaving together support systems from government, from civic community from you know, local park and rec board and other opportunities and just having a great teacher in your classroom and how that can inspire a child and provide the right kind of support, whether it's support for your health and your nutrition or whether it support for after school care and activities or having a Great Teacher in a classroom who inspires you to do your best and provide you with the right kinda support to be able to achieve. So I don't make any excuses. I think it can be done. I've seen it done. I've see it both personally and in my own professional experience, I've seeing it done and I see school systems and schools in particular who have done it well and who have beaten the odds against all odds when children have lacked opportunity early in their school career.
Katherine Kokal: Thank you. You talked about some of the general examples of programs that can work to help close this gap. Do you have any specific examples of what's being done in Milwaukee public schools right now to do that?
Brenda Cassellius: Well, Milwaukee Public Schools has three-year-old programs and four-year old programs, to which they're not fully refunded, so that gives children a good start. They do child find, which makes sure that children with early onset of disability were able to do and find those children and provide support with their pediatricians and with our school-based teams. So that's a really critical, early piece. They used to have Head Start, and Head Start is a great wraparound program to provide also parenting and support training. We hope to get that program back into the schools. We don't have it right now. They have a strong recreation program, Park and Recreation program that offers all kinds of supports to families and community and brings the community into our schools. And then, when we get to the basics of what we do here in Milwaukee Public Schools on the academic side of the house, it's making sure that we have great principals, great teachers, strong curriculum that we are providing for an academic demand and rigor within our course of study for students, particularly at the middle and high school ages, career pathway work for our high school students. Launching them off into post-secondary school, giving them the hope for their future, setting them up with making sure that they have their interests and support systems around art, music, PE. Many thanks to our Milwaukee residents for their capacity and supporting our schools with the referendum, to be able to do those things. So a number of things that our teams do to provide wraparound services, to provide direct academics, and then to engage the community in children's learning, whether it's tutoring, whether it is in-kind supports of coming in and supporting families when they're in crisis or when they need additional financial, or support for like clothing, or some of their other basic needs, housing, et cetera. So those types of things can sometimes mitigate the challenges around poverty and help set children up to be successful.
Katherine Kokal: Dr. Brenda Cassellius is the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, and we're talking about the achievement gap between white and Black students. So MPS has several, targeted programs to support students. We were just talking, especially, about some of the early childhood education programs, but I'm also thinking about, on the older end, there is the Black and Latino Male Achievement Program. How does that impact a child or a teenager's test score? I mean, these achievement gaps are literally measured by test scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress. So how do these kind of social and emotional support systems impact the score that a child gets on a test?
Brenda Cassellius: My background in my undergraduate studies was child psychology and psychology. And I don't think we talk enough about the impact of test scores and a child's psychology around their own self-esteem and self-efficacy in their learning. And then also the bias, having been former commissioner in education and setting the standards and doing all of the work around building assessments, I know firsthand that assessments are very difficult and that they are very difficult in the way in which the questions are asked, the critical thinking that is demanded of a student when they are answering these questions. Oftentimes adults will take these assessments and fail, themselves, because they are just incredibly challenging to do. So, I think, one, we have to look at assessments very critically in terms of the bias that they have and their accuracy, statistically, in terms of what any individual student might be scoring. I think we use them to make more generalized assumptions about students learning, generally, in the overall implications of whether students in a large cohort are making or not making grade level standards. But when they're used to predict individual students or used for high stakes, that's more inappropriate in terms of these assessments. And I don't think that most people know that. And so, that's where the challenge comes in because, when you're trying to move the Black-white student achievement gap, you need to be looking individual by individual, school by school. It has to be that precise. And test scores aren't necessarily, and often aren't, the best measure of that performance. What's a better measure of performance is actually that students work on course assessments that are given by the teacher to really gage whether they're making progress toward grade level standards, rather than the once-a-year Forward Test, for instance, that's given to all students across the state, which is much more of an aggregate type of measure, or even a more difficult measure and even further removed from the individual, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which only samples some students and not all students within a district. And I don't think that the general public understands that as well.
Katherine Kokal: I want to go back real quick to the Black and Latino Male Achievement Program, because it's one of several that the district is actually restructuring into an equity department. Thirty-four positions will become eight after these budget cuts. What do you make of your commitment to serving these students, while also restructurng into a centralized equity department?
Brenda Cassellius: So we have probably the largest Black-white student gap across the nation. I know certainly our students are scoring, particularly our black students, are scoring in the zero percentile. So that strategy was not working for us. They would get into a handful of schools. We have 139 schools. We need them in every single school. So we moved to a district-wide team, a leadership team, that then would drive support systems and strategies and build capacity at the school level. Just like I said earlier, getting into, you have to be at the individual student level, the individual school level in order to move the achievement gap. You can't just be in some schools to move to the whole district. You need to be in all of them. And so we're creating school-based teams. So we're actually increasing the capacity to be a more system-wide approach rather than just an approach that is only getting, you know, some kids and not all kids.
Katherine Kokal: I wanted to talk to you specifically about this, not because these achievement gaps are just, like, all laid at the feet of public schools in Milwaukee. We have almost as many students being educated out of public school as we do in public schools in our city, so even these metrics referencing Milwaukee as a whole are happening in addition to MPS specific reports. I bring up that finding because 22 of the 50 lowest performing schools are on the North Side of Milwaukee. Not all of those are public schools. 17 of them are public schools. But I want to share a quote from a conversation I had with Colleston Morgan of the pro-choice and charter City Forward Collective. He said that that metric of low-performing schools means that, quote, "We cannot solve these challenges just by looking to Milwaukee Public Schools, and we can't solve these challenge without Milwaukee Public Schools." How do you respond to that?
Brenda Cassellius: I think it's a great reflection of the reality on the ground. Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin has chosen to engage in a choice system for families. And unfortunately, that hasn't panned out the way that I think that they had hoped it would, which is, like, an incredible amount of higher achievement for Black children or poor children or children who are not yet mastering the English language, or children even with disabilities. And what we see is I think it has created more instability for families and children who move from one system to the other system back and forth. I think also has diffused the revenue landscape to be able to concentrate services within one type of system. And I think that it has also provided for different types of opportunities for children and created greater disparity among the different types of schools. There just needs to be a much more coordinated effort around the children of Milwaukee, regardless of what type of system you go to now, since the city has chosen it, to ensure that there is a compelling political will, that there is, you know, instructional materials in all of our schools, that teachers are in our classrooms and they are permanently licensed, and that we are focusing on holding families accountable for sending their children to school so that their attendance is 95% or better, which is a huge problem to achievement. We can't educate children who aren't there. And then, as a city, wrapping ourselves around all of our nonprofit community, our philanthropic community, our civic community, to ensure that time out of school is well spent, safe, and engaging for children.
Katherine Kokal: Dr. Brenda Cassellius, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, thanks so much for speaking with me about this today. I appreciate it.
Brenda Cassellius: Thank you.
Audrey Nowakowski: Dr. Brenda Cassellius is the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. She spoke with education reporter, Katherine Kokal for our series, "Beats Me." You can find more on the opportunity gap between white and Black students in Milwaukee at wuwm.com.
Addressing the achievement gap involves bringing families out of poverty
Meanwhile, a conservative-leaning organization that’s looked at Wisconsin's education disparities has advocated for looking beyond race when considering the achievement gap – and focusing instead on poverty.
Will Flanders is the research director of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
“The way to help these minority students reach higher levels of achievement isn't to focus on race," he says. "The solutions still lie generally in the same things that will be effective for any student of any race that comes from a low-income background.”
Part of what Flanders said appears to cut across the political spectrum: To close the achievement gap, Milwaukee should address underlying issues of poverty, invest in early literacy and better fund special education.
But Cassellius, the MPS superintendent, says she doesn't like using poverty as an "excuse" for leaving students behind.
And school board director James Ferguson says that addressing poverty will require more investment in areas like the district he represents, not closing schools.
"When we treat every student the same without regard to their circumstances, their unique circumstances or their unique needs, what we see is that [achievement] gap continue to widen," he says.
"But when we specifically lean into and not shy away from these groups that are underperforming, when we develop programming specifically around that, the achievement of that group, we see the group increases [in achievement,]" he says.
At the center of all the debates about the achievement gap are the students who are living it.
And they’re counting on school leaders and the adults in the room to close the gap and open up more opportunities.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
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