Analysis Shows Most Suburban School Districts Doing Well

There’s good news and bad in a report on southeastern Wisconsin public school educational trends, spending, performance and demographics released by the Public Policy Forum on Friday.

The good news: Students in the suburban Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington county districts are finishing school at a rate higher than the state average. For the most part, those students taking the ACT tests for college are also doing better than students in the rest of Wisconsin.

The bad news: The urban school districts continue to be plagued by low graduation rates and poor tests scores. And handful of the suburban districts — St. Francis, West Allis, Greenfield, Cudahy and Brown Deer — reported 10^th grade reading or math scores below the state average.

The Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee-based nonpartisan policy research organization, has been studying schools in southeastern Wisconsin and issuing annual reports for 25 years. Initially, the analysis was aimed primarily at school districts, but Anneliese Dickman, the group's research director, said the report is now designed to give parents school performance data.

Nicolet is No. 1 in spending

By far, the district in the region with the highest total operations spending per pupil is the Nicolet Union, the North Shore high school district and three lower feeder school districts for Glendale, River Hills, Fox Point and Bayside. The total cost per student was listed at $20,438 in the report.

But the amount spent on actual instruction by Nicolet and its feeder districts, while still among the highest in the region, averaged $9,143 — less than the $9,946 spent by the Northern Ozaukee School District.  The state average is $7,309 and the southeast region average is $7,670.

Nicolet, according to the report, had higher general administration, transportation and other spending costs. Jeff Dellutri, Nicolet's director of business services, was not immediately available to explain those costs.

Dickman cautioned that per-student spending figures might be misleading because it does not include students who live outside the district.

“Each district gets to choose how many students it will accept,” Dickman said. “For some, it allows them to manage class size or even keep some schools open.”

For example, St. Francis, a city that was growing until the recent economic downturn, had been talking about closing an elementary school. With open enrollment, the district had enough students to keep the building open. Other districts, she said, accept students if there is room at a grade level and it does not add operational costs.

Higher spending may not mean better results

How much each district spends on public education varies widely. While the biggest spenders also have high tests scores, some spend less and do better, according to the data. 

 “There is not always a correlation between how much money a school district spends on education and student performance,” Dickman said. “The number of low-income or minority students is likely to lower overall student performance for a district.”

Nicolet students did better than either the region or the state on ACT test scores as well as reading and math tests, but not as well as neighboring Whitefish Bay, a district with significantly lower per-student costs. Whitefish Bay total operational costs per student were $12,612, about $1,100 above the state average, and per-student instructional costs were $7,713, about $400 more than the state average.

In a newsletter sent out last year, the district pointed out relatively low spending and high student performance, said Whitefish Bay District Administrator Mary Gavigan.

“Historically we are compared to the other high-performing school districts — Elmbrook, Nicolet, Shorewood and Mequon-Thiensville,” Gavigan said. “Our performance was near the top at the same time that we had the lowest property tax spending.”

Some success in closing racial gap

Whitefish Bay also has bragging rights in a related area: The district has narrowed the racial achievement gap more significantly than any other in the region and is doing far better than the state average.

The same group of African-American students did better in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades than the state average for white students before dropping somewhat in the eighth grade, according to the report.

Dickman said past forum reports have shown that narrowing the racial gap has been a persistent problem

“We have not seen any narrow the gap year after year,” said Dickman. “We have seen districts make improvements one year, but they don’t maintain it.”

African-American students in Whitefish Bay did better than white students in the fourth grade during the 2006-07 school year, with 83.6 percent scoring proficient or advanced in reading. But by eighth grade in the 2010-11 school year, only 87.5 percent were proficient or advance, compared to 94.2 percent of their white classmates.

Still, Whitefish Bay’s achievement is worth noting, Dickman said.

Eighth-grade African-American students fared worse in the Oak Creek-Franklin District with only half scoring proficient or advanced reading scores. The Milwaukee School District reported that almost 57 percent of the eighth-grade African-American students were proficient or advanced. Still, Dickman said Milwaukee showed 1.2 percent improvement in reading scores compared to last year.

Problems continue in Racine

The Racine Unified School District, the region’s third largest district, showed a 2.6 percent decline.

Brian Dey, who served on the Racine School Board from 2005 to 2008, said the district's poor performance is the reason he is leading a movement for Caledonia to secede from the Racine District.

“They are obviously a very underperforming district,” Dey said. “The other issue for us is local control.”

So far, Dey’s group has not been able to get enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. While his group intends to continue its attempt to get the matter on the ballot, he said he has been lobbying his legislators for a law change that would make forming a new school district easier.

Caledonia residents are already using private schools and open enrollment to find alternatives to the Racine District.

“The census data shows there are 6,000 school-age children in Caledonia,” Dey said. “Only 2,900 go to the Racine schools.”

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Visit the Public Policy Forum's website for a copy of the report, "Public Schooling in Southeast Wisconsin."