A new report says students in Milwaukee's private choice high schools are much more likely to graduate: Such schools had a graduation rate of 85% last year, compared to 58% in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
In flesh-and-blood terms, that means Babatunde Saaka unexpectedly has a future.
The figures are the latest from what is now a five-year report by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren. Milwaukee students using vouchers are pulling farther ahead. If 2003's MPS freshmen had done as well in 2007 as students in choice schools, there'd be 1,517 more high school graduates in Milwaukee.
That's a theoretical number. In life, graduation is more concrete - do or don't, succeed or fail.
Saaka once expected to fail. When the Milwaukee teen graduates from the Hope School this weekend as part of its first graduating class, he will be the first in his family merely to make it through high school. A young man who grew up in fatherless poverty, he's going on to Wisconsin Lutheran College, planning to become a youth counselor, to make a difference for other poor children.
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