MPS now enrolls fewer than half of Milwaukee students. What’s next?
The Milwaukee education landscape has become a 50-50 proposition.
That is to say, half of the children who live in the city of Milwaukee and who receive publicly funded education are enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools system. And half are enrolled in schools that are not part of MPS.
It’s a reality with major implications.
Since the 1990s, when the private school voucher program was launched and the first charter schools joined the scene, the percentage of Milwaukee’s children who are enrolled in MPS has fallen almost every year, generally by one to two percentage points.
This fall, it hit a new low, just below the 50% mark.
At the same time, a second trend is becoming an increasingly important fact for Milwaukee education: The shrinking number of students who live in the city and who are getting publicly funded education in all the streams of local schools. By my unofficial count (for the record, I’ve been keeping tallies on this for a couple decades), this fall the total is 104,363 students. That compares to 117,565 a decade ago – a drop of 13,202 children.
One big cause (and it’s showing up across Wisconsin and nationwide): Declining birth rates. My colleague, Marquette Law School researcher John D. Johnson, has documented the shrinking number of births in Milwaukee. For example, birth records show a 15% decline in babies born to Milwaukee mothers from 2020 to 2025. That will impact school enrollment for many years to come.
The overall decline in the number of children getting publicly funded education in Milwaukee is close to the decline number in MPS alone. Enrollment in the traditional MPS system a decade ago was 66,300, including about 1,500 suburban students enrolled in MPS schools. That is more than 12,000 higher than the comparable figure for MPS enrollment this fall. The brunt of the impact of Milwaukee’s changing population is falling on MPS.
Enrollment, broadly speaking, is tied to the vitality of schools – and it is certainly tied to the financial picture of schools. In a system as large as MPS, there are schools that are packed with students. But there are others where enrollment is far below a building’s capacity – and the number of such schools is increasing. This speaks to the difficult money picture of MPS and to the health of the system overall.
Here’s one way to think about the enrollment decline in MPS: Think of losing 12,000 students as the equivalent of emptying out three high schools of 1,500 students each and 15 elementary and K-8 schools of 500 students each. That gives some context to the current deliberations that could lead to closing a handful of MPS schools.
(By the way, over the last 10 years, MPS has closed almost no schools.)
The strength in numbers for non-MPS schools shows two important things:
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Where have all the students gone?
