Talk to your typical Wisconsinite and they will tell you Milwaukee is the past, Madison is the future. Milwaukee is shrinking, unsafe and broke, they will argue, while Madison is flush with people, turning out votes, and have you seen all of the new construction?
I do not buy it. To keep Wisconsin strong, we need our champion cities to be at their very best. Sadly, Madison is failing to provide the quality of services its citizens deserve.
So I will say in the open what people have been whispering: Madison Metropolitan School District is as troubled as Milwaukee Public Schools is.
Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”
So, what is the product?
Madison’s test scores are near the state’s bottom. Controlling for poverty (so you can see how well a district teaches, not the backgrounds of its students), Madison ranks 13th of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts on the Forward Exam and 12th on the ACT. That is right next to Milwaukee and far below leaders like Sheboygan and Janesville. Specifically, Madison has a tragically high number of students failing mathematics. The percentage of students scoring “developing,” the lowest tier, on the Forward math section is 14 points higher than expected for its student body. The percentage scoring “developing” on ACT’s math portion, a 15 or below, is 12 points higher. Accounting for poverty’s relationship with test performance, Madison’s district vastly underperforms the level predicted by its economic disadvantage.
Hispanic and Black students are doing no better in Madison’s district than they are in Milwaukee’s. The average ACT score for Madison’s Black students is 14.6. Milwaukee’s is 14.4. The average ACT score for Madison’s Hispanic students is 15.9. Milwaukee’s is 16.0. You cannot open the news in Milwaukee without catching another national report rightly reproaching Milwaukee for the nation’s lowest scores and worst gaps. When will Madison receive the same scrutiny?
Madison is getting critical questions wrong, possibly wrecking recovery. Take its mathematics curriculum. The district is getting away from traditional instruction: “I do, we do, you do.” That is how the nation’s best schools teach, how some of the nation’s best coaches coach, and how you teach your child to cook. “I will show you how to crack an egg. Now, we will crack an egg together. Okay, you show me how to crack an egg.” Instead, as Assistant Superintendent Cindy Green explained to Madison’s school board, “We do it together … through dialogue, through discourse, through application. Then, it’s you all go … practice that to yourself. And then, it’s I do and I show you.” That is “productive struggle,” a quick way to frustrate students, squander class time, and develop bad habits. Madison is giving a classroom of first graders cartons of eggs and hoping they do not make a mess.
Madison’s district is squandering immense financial advantages. Ask Milwaukee Public Schools why they need $22,000 per “member” and they will tell you. Too many Milwaukee kids come from multigenerational poverty, walk on unsafe streets, and learn in lead-tainted schools. That is very real. But, get this: Madison spends $22,000 as well! Yes, middle-class Madison ranks in the 89th percentile among big districts nationally in school funding, adjusted for the cost of living. They pay 1 adult for every 6 students, relying on local taxpayers to fund the lowest ratio of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts. As Assistant Superintendent Bob Soldner put it to the school board, “It’s going to implode upon itself if we don’t start getting more support from the state, right?” Nobody can justify such a premium-priced arrangement that produces the same results as Milwaukee Public Schools.
Methodology
The analysis, which was peer-reviewed, estimated a district’s expected performance using an ordinary least squares regression of all districts’ test scores, with poverty as a predictor. The analysis estimated district overperformance or underperformance by the difference between a district’s actual test score and its fitted value.
The analysis drew district poverty from the economic disadvantage rate in the 2024-2025 state report cards, which contain more accurate data than the annual enrollment data.
The analysis separately considered expected performance for Forward and expected performance for ACT.
The analysis separately considered four separate performances for each test: English language arts proficiency (“meeting” plus “advanced” scores), mathematics proficiency, English language arts failure (“developing” plus “no test” scores), and mathematics failure. When considering overall performance, the analysis averaged the four performances for each district.
The analysis excluded the Norris district, a set of small, alternative schools with redacted performance data due to too few students. All eight analyses were statistically significant (p < 0.001). For the Forward performances, coefficients of determination were 0.55593, 0.53059, 0.46296, and 0.43318. For the ACT performances, coefficients of determination were 0.30444, 0.42731, 0.27857, and 0.41260.
This is no blanket dismissal: I would rather retch than read another anti-public-school screed. You need to know Madison’s staff and board care about children. They laid down the law when buses ruined the first weeks of school. No board better advocates for disabled students. They say the right things about reading.
But very smart people with very good intentions still can cause a very big fiasco. For too long, progressive Madison has acknowledged “historically created barriers” to students succeeding without reflecting on the one they have created today. Until parents cause a ruckus or legislators go ask why Madison’s public schools perform more like Portland’s than Washington’s, I fear the district will not resolve why they are getting the wrong answers to the right questions.
Quinton Klabon is Senior Research Director at the Institute for Reforming Government, a Wisconsin-based, free-market think tank. He spends his work and free time helping students thrive. He can be reached at QK@ReformingGovernment.org.
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