In August 2024, the Wisconsin Policy Forum published Roll Call: A Landscape Review of the Students, Financing, and Performance of Milwaukee’s K-12 Schools. Coming decades after a series of state laws established multiple publicly funded education sectors in the city, and one decade after the Forum last took stock of the resulting landscape in a two–part series, Roll Call was intended to ground policy discussions with key facts and nonpartisan insights on Milwaukee’s schooling system. The report looked at the Milwaukee Public Schools, charter schools, and private choice programs and their respective students, funding, and academic outcomes.
The result was a sobering picture on nearly all fronts. Milwaukee is home to a declining student population with high levels of need compared to the rest of the state and country. The enrollment declines have placed financial pressure on the system, since Wisconsin schools receive the majority of their funding on a per-pupil basis and face challenges in adjusting their operations to serve fewer students. In particular, Milwaukee has yet to see a meaningful decrease in the number of schools serving the city’s children.
Most concerning of all were our findings about school performance and student outcomes. Although schooling options for Milwaukee families – especially for low-income families of color – have increased greatly since the 1990s, outcomes for children have not transformed. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the city’s schools were showing some improvement against multiple metrics but remained far below the progress that proponents of the changes had envisioned. The pandemic then erased most of those small gains. Both before and after the pandemic, the majority of Milwaukee students did not attend highly rated schools. Wide disparities in reading and math scores persisted and indeed worsened post-pandemic, particularly between Black and white students.
In response to these most troubling findings, this report turns its attention to the levers and strategies that might improve academic results for Milwaukee students. To identify these approaches, we first examined the Milwaukee schools at which students score above the city’s norm. We identified these schools using both achievement scores and growth scores from the 2023 Report Card issued by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). These scores allowed us to compare students’ knowledge and skills and how much they have grown compared to their peers. We further conducted key informant interviews with a sampling of these schools’ leaders, identifying common themes that may inform the work to improve schools across Milwaukee.
Next, we turned our attention outward: What successful efforts occurring outside of Milwaukee might merit consideration? We used the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to identify districts that share some key characteristics with Milwaukee but have produced stronger outcomes for students over time. Using national and local coverage of the school improvement efforts in these locations, in addition to further key informant interviews, we identified a selection of promising practices and innovations. We then considered whether and how these efforts might work best in Milwaukee.
Our report concludes by synthesizing our findings on Milwaukee’s challenges from Roll Call with these new local and national lessons and by laying out themes and policy options for action. We hope these options will prove useful to policymakers and concerned residents hoping to chart a new path forward for the city’s schools and its children.