Just when it seemed like the annual trends involving the education landscape of Milwaukee had become predictable and boring, a couple of unpredicted things happened.
Around this time every year since 2008, I’ve put together a chart showing where Milwaukee children are getting a publicly funded education, sector by sector. I try not to get too hung up on “sector wars,” but the trends for school enrollment are crucial to understanding our complicated education scene.
In summary, the percentage of students enrolled in the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system was falling by 1 to 2 percentage points almost every year. Use of publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, almost all of them religious, was rising each year (this year, just under a quarter of the city’s students are in the voucher program). Enrollment in non-MPS charter schools was rising each year. And the number of Milwaukee children going to public schools in the suburbs rather than in MPS, using the state’s open enrollment law, was rising substantially.