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Milwaukee Schools Underperforming Badly
The latest look at the Nation’s Report Card is offering a shocking example of just how bad Milwaukee Public Schools are at educating kids.
A new piece in The Education Daily highlights Mississippi’s meteoric rise in reading and math scores, going from one of the worst in the nation to one of the best.
"Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country," the piece notes. "In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer."
Mississippi, according to the piece, ranked at or near the top in last year’s NAEP test in all four major test areas:
Education reformers in Wisconsin took notice, and on Tuesday asked why Milwaukee Public Schools haven’t come close to anything like the ‘Mississippi Miracle’ here.
“Wisconsin is now being outperformed by Mississippi in education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said on Twitter. “We're paying more for worse results with far less challenging demographics.”
“The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin,” the piece added. “Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.”
Milwaukee Public Schools have, and have had for years, the worst racial learning gap in America. The latest test scores from MPS show just 5% of black fourth graders can read or write at grade level.
But it is tough to do a direct comparison with Wisconsin test scores.
The state’s superintendent changed our scores last fall, to get away from the NAEP.
She claimed it better aligns with what Wisconsin kids know. Flanders said the superintendent wanted to cover-up how bad Wisconsin kids are doing.
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