Education recommendations > Revitalize MPS

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Revitalize MPS

Parent choice has resulted in a historically smaller MPS. Now MPS must reassess its future in delivering quality education.
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The Milwaukee Public Schools are foundational to the delivery of K-12 education in the city. Some 58,000 students are educated in 156 school buildings across the district.
 
What has changed for the foreseeable future is the role MPS plays. It is no longer the only source of public education, but part of a system of publicly funded parent choice. Parents can utilize public funding to attend MPS, independent charter and private schools participating in the MPCP program. Today, 45% of the 114,048 students accessing public funding attend a school other than MPS. Many students move between these options over the course of their K-12 career, but MPS enrollment has been on a steady decline for 20 years.  
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MPS needs a strategic plan that revitalizes the academic outcomes of the students it’s educating. This plan will require both the recognition of the reality of parent choice, and the implementation of changes that best utilizes resources for improving student outcomes. 

Summary of recommendations featured below.

1. Prioritize student outcomes from investment
2. Make charter schools part of the MPS plan
3. Right size the district’s capital costs
4. Provide access to underutilized MPS buildings
5. Change the timing of school board elections​

Prioritize student outcomes from investment.

MPS has an opportunity to both improve student outcomes and provide transparent accountability to parents and taxpayers.
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MPS’s strategic plan must identify how its investments in human and physical capital will improve student outcomes. Implementation should maximize resources in the classroom with a realistic assessment of its personnel and capital requirements. If funding sources are utilized as a fiscal life preserver to keep MPS afloat in this storm of declining enrollment, student outcomes will continue to sink.   

Examples include an unprecedented one-time investment of $700M in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, which exceeded 70% of the district’s annual budget. Combined with a permanent tax increase that provides an ongoing infusion of $87M in per-pupil funding. This additional property tax funding is completely decoupled from enrollment declines. MPS must communicate a clear strategy to improve student outcomes.

Make charter schools part of the MPS plan.

Independent charter schools, authorized by MPS, represent its 
fastest-growing enrollment and account for 20% of MPS students.

The schools also account for many of the district’s highest-performing schools. Yet it is unclear if they are part of MPS’s strategy to serve students. The MPS board and administration vacillate between benign neglect and outright hostility when it comes to schools authorized as charters of the district. To further emphasize this point, MPS property tax revenue is not used to support independent district charter schools, inclusive of the $87M in new property tax revenue. The referendum property tax increase could have provided an additional $1,450 per student to the underfunded independent charter schools – MPS-authorized schools attended by students whose parents pay MPS property taxes. ​

MPS should embrace a pro-charter strategy. It has proven to enhance quality school offerings. It would retain and attract students, bolstering district finances dependent on enrollment. Additionally, underutilized MPS buildings could house growing charter school enrollment, potentially alleviating the need for substantial capital campaigns, funded by individual and corporate philanthropy.    ​

Right size the district’s financial footprint, enrollment projections & capital costs

​Every dollar spent by MPS on a vacant or underutilized school building is a dollar removed from classroom teaching or student support.

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Excess overhead creates fiscal challenges
A significant portion of MPS revenue is driven by its enrollment, so dropping enrollment without an offset in overhead costs puts the district in a fiscally challenged position. MPS is projecting a cumulative deficit of $331M over the next five years. This is despite the unprecedented permanent referendum that provides an additional $87M annually that does not go to charter schools – revenue that is immune from enrollment declines.  

Now even MPS schools, like Ronald Reagan College Prep High School, are turning to outside philanthropy. 

This frustration is ripe in the business community. The expansion of the MPCP and independent charter schools has increased philanthropic requests for not only capital, but also for operating support to make up for lower per-pupil funding. That essentially leaves businesses to pay twice: First through their property taxes -- commercial property accounts for 40% of MPS property tax revenue. Second through corporate donations. 

Declining enrollment means excess capactiy 
Back in 2018, MPS Superintendent Keith Posley announced a new city-wide enrollment initiative aimed at adding 2,000 new students. MPS enrollment has declined by 8,000 students since then in 2022.

Also in 2018, MGT Consulting Group produced a final report for a long-range facility master plan for the Milwaukee Public Schools. The report noted that “MPS can reasonably expect enrollment to continue to decline, and the number of excess seats to increase.” 
The report noted that district enrollment in 2018 was 66,622 students, while it had a 78,074-seat capacity. MPS was carrying 14% in excess seats. The report went on to project that excess capacity would grow to 18,105 seats (23%) by 2027-2028, based on a then-projected enrollment of 59,969. MPS is likely to drop to this enrollment seven years ahead of projection, with enrollment less than 60,000 for the 2022-23 school year.

All schools are being challenged by a demographic decline in students, as the school-age 3-17 population is down by 5% over a decade. The MPS enrollment decline escapes a demographic explanation.

​Right size district capital costs
An oversized footprint draws capital investment away from upgrading and investing in state-of-the-art schools. Just like any business, MPS faces the challenge of a “right sized” capital budget, one that smartly meets current needs while investing for the future. MPS needs a comprehensive forward-looking facilities plan -- now.

According to recent MPS budget data, MPS has a facilities mismatch. MPS operates 156 school sites, posting an average enrollment of 450 students per site. The average large urban district has 586 students per school site. This calculation would project MPS to have 20-25% excess capacity. The district is spending more on buildings and maintenance expenses than is necessary. ​

An updated MPS facilities study is needed to identify excess capacity as part of a plan to right-size the district school building portfolio with the goal of better serving students, reducing excess carrying costs and potentially freeing up facilities for use by other quality school providers.

MPS’s mismanagement of its school facilities results in three major problems: 
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​1. Excess capacity costs

MPS could be carrying 17,000 empty seats. Multiplying MGT’s calculation of the average per-student operating cost by the number of empty seats ($11,002 x 17,000) shows us that MPS could be spending $187M for students that don’t exist.

2. Poor utilization of existing facilities

This endemic overcapacity obscures the real story: Poor utilization of existing school facilities. According to the MGT study, “there are schools over-enrolled as well as schools significantly under-enrolled/utilized.” Take MPS’s decade-long ignorance of its highest performing high-school, Ronald Reagan High. The Reagan high students are in a middle school facility that has a stated capacity of 900 students, yet it currently holds 1,400 students. Reagan High could easily fill 2,000 spots. Those who can’t get in often leave MPS for other options. 

​3. Community wide inefficiency

The mismanagement of MPS school facilities chokes off the growth of high-quality school options both in and outside the district. A good example of the impact of under-enrollment is three MPS middle schools in the Highland Park neighborhood that leave students and families poorly served. The highest of the average student performance at Carver, Holmes and King has 1.8% of the students proficient in English Language Arts and 3.8% proficient in math. These schools join 20 others on the north and northwest sides that were rated as “failing to meet expectations.” Five of these schools had no students reading at grade level. 

When Rufus King Middle school dipped to 53% enrollment, instead of consolidating its students and selling the building to St. Marcus for $10M, MPS invested $10M into Rufus King -- only to see enrollment skid further from 440 to 414, making the building even more underutilized. Meanwhile, St. Marcus raised funds to expand its campus to support enrollment that has now grown to 950 students. 

​Provide access to underutilized MPS buildings

An efficient answer to meeting some of the current capital needs involves school buildings already funded with taxpayer dollars, sitting idle or underutilized. 
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​Corpoarate taxpayers account for 40% of the MPS tax base, and those companies and their foundations are being pitched to fund new or renovated school buildings. And Milwaukee is 
not unique. 

A February 2022 Wall Street Journal story noted that Oakland education officials voted to close seven schools amid enrollment declines. The Oakland Unified School district has lost more than 20,000 students since 2000, and now enrolls 33,000 students.
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MPS enrollment is on a decades-long decline, but its impact on MPS facility needs has evaded a strategic assessment. MPS has gone to great lengths, with tacit support from the city, which serves as MPS’s landlord, to avoid right-sizing its facility footprint and potentially putting its school buildings on the market.
The capital costs and debt from renovations or new school buildings driven by parent demand places another barrier on the growth of quality schools. 

Recent examples include:
•   $42M expansion of St. Augustine Prep
•   $30M build of the new Hmong American Peace Academy 
•   $20M for a new Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy campus
•   $17M expansion of St. Marcus 
•   $3M expansion of Central City Cyber School

With additional school expansions underway collective capital needs run north of $150M. Capital funding also feeds into requests for annual operating support for choice and charter schools. 
Current state statutes identify the conditions under which underutilized school buildings operate. MMAC supports strengthen these provisions and advocating that the city better enforce existing law.

Change the timing of school board election

There are around 300,000 registered voters in the City of Milwaukee. Spring election turnout averages 6% (20,000 voters).

Greater citizen engagement in school board elections 
would be a positive for Milwaukee, while potentially improving oversight of a $1.2B taxpayer funded K-12 provider. MMAC advocates for moving the April elections to the fall (November) to increase turnout and oversight over the state’s largest school district. Absent this change, MPS board governance could also be reformed by shifting to a model of appointed Board 
of School directors.