Milwaukee Rising

The JS had had a half story in the paper yesterday about suburban school districts’ diversity. A major point of the story was that suburban districts now are educating minorities who don’t have to be bused to the suburbs, but who actually live there.

The story, though, relied on cherry-picked statistics and an unrepresentative sampling of area school districts to make the point. It’s a half story because so very much was left out.

Enrollment data shows that of the non-white students in Wauwatosa schools, 65% live within the district’s attendance boundaries,” the story reports.

So 65% of what? What is the base number? The story doesn’t say. Isn’t it rather important to know whether there are a total of 10 minorities or 1,000?

The State Department of Public Instruction says the Wauwatosa district is about 26% minority this year, which means the resident minority student population is about 17%. Whoopee.

The county’s overall minority population is about 31% and its black population is 25%. The city of Wauwatosa’s overall minority population is 6% and its black population is about 2%, according to the US Census Bureau. That’s progress for you!

Given all that, what conclusions can be drawn from the story? Only that there was some less than sterling reporting and editing going on.

In Greenfield, according to the story:

…the number of minoirity students living in the district’s attendance zone grew faster than that of minoirty Greenfield students living outside the district.

Well, heavens. Isn’t that just as meaningless as can be. It’s total mud. Are we talking actual numbers or percentages? If it’s the latter, a very small increase in the number of resident minority students would likely mean a huge increase in the growth rate because the base is so small. (Going from one to two is a 100% increase, but going from 100 to 101 is just a 1% increase). The Greenfield district over the last three years has seen a small decline in its overall black enrollment and increases in its Hispanic, Native American and Asian enrollments, according to DPI. The DPI data does not differentiate between resident and non-resident minorities. The city of Greenfield is 94% white with a 1% black population. It has a Latino population of about 4%, an Asian population of about 2%, and a Native American population of less than 1%. That does not bode well for residential minority enrollments in the public school system.

Meanwhile, what districts did the paper omit? What about Well, there’s Oconomowoc, which is 94% white (growing slightly more diverse over three years), and Lake Country, which is 95% white (growing a bit more white over the last three years) and Richfield, also 95% white (no change over the last three years).

The overall question seems to be: why does this story even exist?