What do you think of when you think of youth in Milwaukee? Perhaps you think of mental health issues, low levels of graduation or even increasing levels of violence. When we think of youth in Milwaukee, you might find it difficult to see the positives in light of negative press coverage.
It is time to change that story.
Statistics and data points related to challenges facing our youth are real. They aren’t “fake news.” But they don’t tell the whole story. Incomplete data is often used to create incomplete narratives. These stories confine, marginalize and stereotype Milwaukee youth. These stories drive actions, ideas, discussions, programs, and the policies we propose and implement in local and state governments.
It’s time we expand the data, tell complete stories and harness our strengths to build a thriving environment for youth in Milwaukee. It’s time to both hold the realities of systemic racism, historical inequity, educational challenges and under-resourced supports in the data we see day in and day out, while also moving beyond these negative lenses to bring light through data to the power, resilience and change that is taking root all around us.
Let’s take one statistic: high school graduation. Using Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) data, Milwaukee Succeeds’ High School Success Dashboard reports that while 71% of students in Milwaukee graduate in four years, 90% across all of Wisconsin do, and just 67% of Latino/Latina students and 60% of Black students in our city achieve this marker. These are just numbers, but they immediately frame how we think about Milwaukee, its schools and its youth. We see these numbers and instantly go to what we think about the ways these young people or their educators are failing, giving up or simply not making the mark.
But behind statistics lie real people. Statistics hide nuance, complexity, resilience, coping and support — along with the thousands of lives, millions of moments and what goes into each journey toward graduation. The voices of young people and youth-serving organizations provide critical insight into underlying, lived stories: Do they feel like they are graduating ready for what’s next, what are the factors locally that feed into whether individual youth graduate, like mental health, economics, housing stability and trauma?
We need to think bigger to envision this complex reality underlying the numbers. One of the primary obstacles right now is the lack of coordinated, nuanced data that gives life to data points like high school graduation. DPI reports transparently on graduation rates by race and gender, but getting at what those numbers look like across these groups — such as Black boys and Latina girls —is a convoluted and drawn-out process. A more transparent, deeper look at data would give policy makers and community organizations a better sense of the diversity in how youth are actually doing.
At the Black and Latino/a Ecosystem and Support Transition (BLEST) Hub, we have spent the last five years cultivating relationships data and envisioning this as an ecosystem. An ecosystem may conjure up ideas of rainfall, vegetation and wildlife — the natural world around us — but life in Milwaukee for young people as they grow up and navigate the world is also an ecosystem. The ecosystem includes the teachers, neighbors and friends they interact with, the institutions and systems that have taken shape over time, the current events and issues (from broad world-altering ones like the COVID-19 pandemic to the opening of a local grocery store), the news, media and social media — and even the health and wellness of the local environment.
Thinking about an ecosystem moves us from looking at numbers in isolation to thinking of our youth as complex, dynamic lives and understanding the areas of strength, resilience and challenge. It gives life to numbers and uplifts stories of strength, resilience and power.
Using this approach, over the last year, we have rekindled a county-wide My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) initiative, with the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee as the backbone, to synergize efforts to change the lives of young people of color in Milwaukee. The work has been supported by Mayor Cavalier Johnson and County Executive David Crowley, two millennial, native Milwaukeeans who are open about the pride they have in our region and how their respective life journeys were shaped by organizations, people and systems of strength that helped them excel in challenging times. They each have a compelling narrative beyond numbers and statistics. Their lives and stories also reflect the nuance, complexity and power beyond the statistics.
Building on the strengths of Milwaukee — our history of action and resilience, organizations working hard to support youth, young people themselves, and current leadership and initiatives — we must take advantage of this moment.
With MBK-MKE, Crowley, Johnson and the recent push for accountability and transparency, now is the time to start building new stories.
The change begins with new, integrated and transparent data, and it ends with a strong Milwaukee where the beauty, dignity, strength and thriving of our Black and Brown youth are front and center.
Wisconsin Watch does not author opinion pieces but occasionally publishes editorials by knowledgeable sources related to our reporting. This column follows a January Wisconsin Watch/News414 report on new efforts to improve academic achievement by Black males in Milwaukee. Walter Lanier is president and CEO of the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee, or AALAM, and pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church of Milwaukee. Gabriel Velez is an assistant professor of educational policy and leadership in the College of Education at Marquette University and the faculty director of the Black and Latino/a Ecosystem and Support Transition (BLEST) Hub in the Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach.
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