Milwaukee Students Are Disappearing » Urban Milwaukee

Where have all the students gone?

A recent report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum noted that “after three decades…the number of students enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the number of students paying tuition to attend private schools have declined precipitously, while the number of students in charter schools and private schools receiving public vouchers continues to grow.”
But Sarah Shawassociate director of research at WPF, tells Urban Milwaukee that the K-12 education landscape has been changing, even since the last report was written. “Our report is a longitudinal look at what happened,” Shaw says. It looks back decades; it’s not necessarily a good predictor of what will happen in the future, or even of changes in the past few years.

“If you look closely at recent years, you’ll see some interesting fluctuations,” Shaw says.

MPS showed a lower enrollment loss for 2023-24, from more than 1,000 students per year to just 51 students, Urban Milwaukee reported in May. Shaw’s final numbers show MPS’s loss at 187. However, the district is projecting enrollment growth for the upcoming year (2024-25).

But Shaw advises “cautious optimism” about that forecast. It could just be a short-term trend of students who dropped out during the COVID-19 pandemic returning, he notes. “We don’t know how many of those students coming into the MPS system are new students or how many should have been here from the beginning and are now re-enrolling. It could be a bit of a false inflation. … It may not be indicative of future trends.” Shaw believes MPS will continue to lose students.

Meanwhile, two other sectors, independent charter schools and NICs (non-instrumental MPS charter schools not staffed by MPS staff), combined saw a long-term increase of 8,372 students, “more than doubling from 7,323 in 2006 to 15,695 in 2024 — the largest percentage increase of any sector,” the WPF report said. “The gains were split equally between independent charter schools and NICs.”

But that’s an 18-year trend. Data from recent years shows that charter schools are now losing students. MPS charter schools that are not instrumental schools have been losing students since 2020, and independent charter schools have been losing students since 2022, Shaw notes. “MPS is still bearing the brunt of that, but these other two charter providers (The City of Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee) are starting to feel some pressure.” They’re also starting to lose students. Urban Milwaukee reported this decline in charter school enrollment back in May.

In the short term, the only sector gaining students is private choice or voucher schools. “Choice participation has increased year over year since 2021,” Shaw says.

The increase in enrollment in choice may be due to an increase in allowable family income. While the MPS voucher program was originally established to help low-income families, now middle-class families from Milwaukee can enroll in the program. A Milwaukee family of four with an annual income of $90,000 can qualify for vouchers. Measuring the impact on income is difficult, Shaw says. “We can’t get student-level data” to determine how many are in the choice program because of the increased income limits, he notes.

Still, one clear loss is the number of students in Milwaukee’s private schools that pay tuition. “A city like Milwaukee has experienced such a large white flight that there are fewer families who can afford to pay tuition,” Shaw says. “The long-term national trend is for upper- and middle-income families to enroll their children in urban private schools.” Increased income limits on vouchers allow middle-income families to choose private schools if they stay in Milwaukee. The question remains whether private schools will be able to maintain enrollment at a shrinking rate by drawing students from MPS and charter schools.

If there are fewer students in Milwaukee, where have they gone? Most were never born.

“Most of the kids who graduated in June or May of last year were born in 2006. Since then, the birth rate in the city of Milwaukee has dropped by 31 percent,” he said. John Johnsonresearch associate at Marquette University Law School, in a discussion of his findings with Urban Milwaukee. “When you compare the number of births that go to first grade in the city of Milwaukee, I don’t care what sector the school is in, as long as the school is in the city of Milwaukee, there’s a very close correlation between enrollment and births,” he described the findings on his Marquette University Law School blog.

In addition to the long-term decline in the birth rate, there has been a net migration of families with children out of the city, resulting in “a fairly steady 15 to 20 percent decline in the number of first-graders relative to the number of children born,” Johnson notes. Because of “migration,” he notes, “we are losing as many as a fifth of young children before they are six.” Another blog post offers more detail on this pattern.

“If this relationship between birth rates and first-grade enrollment holds,” Shaw notes, “citywide first-grade enrollment will likely be 16% to 22% lower in 2029 than in 2023,” he says.

“I find it hard to believe that this won’t affect MPS in some way,” he adds. That means enrollment will likely continue to decline in future years.

While the city’s growing Latino population has boosted the percentage of Latino students in Milwaukee schools, Johnson doesn’t expect it to have a long-term positive impact on enrollment. “All of these different demographic groups are on a different baseline, but they’re on the same trajectory,” Johnson says. “We would see the same downward trend in (Latino) births.”

It appears that all types of K-12 schools in Milwaukee will feel the impact.