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Linkage Between Education & Poverty
The latest report on childhood poverty in Wisconsin gets close to linking poverty to the state’s failing public schools.
The latest Kids Count report gives Wisconsin mixed grades for poverty.
"While Wisconsin received a score of 692 and ranks 8th best overall, these numbers alone can be deceiving. Despite consistently ranking near the top nationally on many child well-being indicators, Wisconsin continues to have some of the deepest racial disparities in the country," the report states.
That includes racial disparities in Wisconsin’s schools.
"Wisconsin’s racial disparity between Black and white students graduating on time was the largest among all states with available data (28% of Black children versus 5% of white children)," the report adds. "Whitefish Bay has a graduation rate of 98%, Milwaukee Public Schools has recently reached a record-high graduation rate of 71%.”
The report, instead, lays the blame for the graduation rates on "school funding disparities."
“It’s devastating to watch data releases year after year that so clearly display the way we’re not meeting the moment for our kids. K-12 education is a fundamental launching pad for our youth, and disparities that are this large, this consistent, cannot be ignored,” said Faith Roska, Youth Policy Advocacy Coach at Kids Forward.
The report also ignores the massive gap in reading, writing, and math scores between black and white students in the state.
National Report Card numbers show that 95% of black fourth graders in Milwaukee Public Schools cannot solve a simple word problem. In Madison, that number is 90%.
Wisconsin continues to have the worst racial-learning-gap in America. And the scores are not improving.
The Kids Count report is silent on those issues.
Instead it talks about healthcare reform, a $20 per-hour minimum wage, and “communities that care.”
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