What follows is not a list of schools that will be closed by Milwaukee Public Schools in the next several years. But it’s an important list that is worthy of attention — and some of the schools may well end up being closed.
The 15 Milwaukee schools, as well as one Racine school, are among almost 500 schools across the United States that were named in a new report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute , a Washington-based education advocacy and research organization with a generally conservative approach. The new report has the provocative title, “Underachieving and Underenrolled: Chronically Low-Performing Schools in the Post-Pandemic Era.”
The report comes (coincidentally) at a time when work is heating up on a long-term facilities plan for Milwaukee Public Schools. MPS has declining enrollment and, by almost any definition, more buildings and space than it needs. But figuring out what to do to “right size” the district will be difficult and controversial, as a recent set of community meetings showed.
An outside consultant, hired by MPS, has proposed broad guidelines for considering the future of schools. Among the factors for considering a school for closing are low performance and declining enrollment — although there are other factors also, including location and proximity to other schools.
The Fordham report focuses on schools that meet the definition of low performance under federal law and which saw substantial enrollment declines from the 2019-20 school year to the 2022-23 school year. It did not focus on schools with longer-term low enrollment and performance issues, and MPS has quite a few of those.
The Fordham report said nearly one in 12 public schools in the U.S. experienced substantial enrollment decline in the period covered by the report. Not all of them were low performing, but “schools that were identified by their states as chronically low performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other schools.”
MPS has closed a minimum of schools since about 2008, even as enrollment has fallen by more than 20,000 students. There also is no notable initiative currently aimed at changing the outcomes for students, especially in schools with the weakest rates of success.
The Fordham report was authored by Sofoklis Goulas, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution . In an introduction, two Fordham leaders, Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli, said decisions on closing schools are “painful, politically fraught decisions,” and school district leaders often postpone them as long as they can. But eventually — as may well be the case in Milwaukee — decisions have to be made. The two wrote, “To us, it’s clear: The foremost consideration is — within the resources available to us — what’s best for educating the students of this community?”
According to a report by Perkins-Eastman, the independent consultant working with MPS on the long-range facilities plan, nearly two-thirds of all MPS schools lost students between 2014 and 2024. The overall average: Each MPS school lost 146 students during that period.
The consultants found that while the average utilization rate (that is to say, the number of students compared to the building’s capacity) for MPS schools is 80%, “it is not evenly distributed across MPS school buildings.”
Using figures from September 2023, the consultants said 22% of MPS schools have a utilization below 50% and 28% have a rate above 100%.
In four recent public listening sessions about the future of MPS buildings, there was support for keeping even some clearly underenrolled and low-performing schools open. Other urban school districts around the U.S. and smaller districts around Wisconsin that have undertaken school closing plans because of decreasing enrollment have encountered controversy.
More: Green Bay School Board votes to close Langlade, Elmore and MacArthur Elementary schools
More: Neenah school board narrowly approves plan that includes closing Hoover Elementary
More: Menasha school board votes to close Jefferson Elementary School after this school year
Recommendations from Perkins-Eastman to the Milwaukee School Board are expected soon.
One big issue that is almost sure to make school closing, merger or overhaul decisions difficult is that the schools with enrollment much below a building’s capacity and with weak academic results are almost all on the north side. Schools on the south side are generally operating at or above capacity.
In the Fordham report, all 15 of the Milwaukee schools listed as having declining enrollment and low student performance are on the north side. The potential for controversies focused on race and geography as MPS proceeds with the facilities plan is very high.
Here are the 15 MPS schools that the Fordham report listed, with their 2022-2023 enrollment and the percent decline from the 2019-20 school year:
- Clarke Street Elementary, 192, down 28%
- Hi-Mount Elementary, 149, down 25%
- Milwaukee Sign Language Elementary, 429, down 26%
- Lafollette Elementary, 183, down 24%
- Marshall High, 798, down 24%
- Riverwest Elementary, 258, down 24%
- Townsend Street Elementary, 280, down 20%
- Carson Academy, 350, down 24%
- Lincoln Middle School, 374, down 40%
- Brown Street Academy, 223, down 28%
- Carver Academy, 351, down 28%
- Alliance School, 145, down 23%
- Washington Information Technology High School, 417, down 31%.
- Siefert Elementary, 234, down 23%.
- King International Baccalaureate Middle School, 271, down 29%.
The Racine school listed is Starbuck – a K-8 international baccalaureate school, with an enrollment of 509, down 26%.
Are these schools on the chopping block? Not necessarily. But does this list of schools give reason to prod bold, fresh thinking and action on what can be done to get them off of lists such as this one? Yes.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu .
This story was updated to add a video.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 15 Milwaukee schools and 1 Racine school on Fordham Institute list of 'underachieving and underenrolled' schools nationwide
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