Previous Milwaukee school boards actually lowered the bar for MPS graduates. They canceled writing and math proficiency tests and decreased credits needed to graduate. We were going in the wrong direction.
When I got on the board, I called for making all our students college-ready. MPS should require all our graduates to take the ACT college entrance exam. Six states now required that; I wanted MPS to join them.
Up to that point, state leaders shamelessly trumpeted that Wisconsin was number one on the ACT, Wisconsin having the highest ACT scores in the nation. They ignored the fact that a third of Wisconsin graduates were not even taking the test while many other states had much higher participation rates. I pointed this out in articles I wrote for Milwaukee Magazine and other publications. I voiced my analysis of this misrepresentation in radio and television interviews.
Because of my efforts, the MPS school board will now require that all MPS graduates take the ACT. States that have instituted this requirement have seen an increase in the number of students going to college and, just as important, staying in college and getting their degrees. The same thing should take place for Milwaukee graduates.
Now State School Superintendent Tony Evers is signaling that Wisconsin might join these other states. Evers proposes that the state of Wisconsin pay half the cost of administering the ACT to school districts that agree to have their students take the ACT on a school day. Evers also says the state should do the same for the “Explore” and “Plan” tests by the ACT given in the eighth and tenth grades.
I have also pushed our MPS administration to reestablish “Honors” classes in our regular high schools as well as allowing any student to write for honors within a regular class if that student’s school does not offer an honors section. We must also do the same with Advanced Placement classes and encourage the use of online AP classes if a school is not able to offer an AP class in a particular subject area.
We are past the days when we can sort students into two groups: those who are going on to college and those who are going directly into the world of work. Steering students into shop classes in high school doesn’t do it anymore. We can no longer rely on a handful of college prep schools or college prep programs within our regular high schools. Even students who are going onto technical schools after high school must have pretty much the same skill sets as students going onto college.
Thankfully momentum is moving in the right direction. We must raise all our children up; we must make them all college-ready.
