To attend the three central city schools in the Milwaukee College Prep system is to immerse yourself in a message: I may be 5 or 7 or 9 years old, but I’m here to get ready for college.
The classrooms and hallways in the charter schools feature pennants from the colleges that teachers graduated from. Banners identify each class by the year the students would enroll in college in the normal sequence of things. The new first-graders are the Class of 2025. In fifth grade, students begin making visits to colleges.
It’s a highly ambitious message and a highly ambitious school, with results to back up its goals. (Disclosure: I have a family member who works for the schools now, but I said the same things before that was true.) And pushing the college message to students who are predominantly black and low income is in line with what is being done at the best and most ambitious schools in many other central cities.
So is it a good idea to push the college so hard so young? In my mind, the answer is almost entirely yes. There are so many kids, families and schools with lower expectations, so many students who are already on a path at a young age to stay at the bottom of the economic spectrum.
If one of the goals of education is to open doors of opportunity, a crucial element is inculcating expectations and giving kids the capacity to pursue those expectations. Milwaukee College Prep and a few comparable schools in the city are doing that.