Summary:
There is just one middle school serving the city of Ishpeming, Michigan: Ishpeming Middle School, which enrolls 185 students in grades 5 through 8 and is part of the Ishpeming Public School District No. 1.
For parents, the most important takeaway is that this school is facing a serious and consistent challenge in mathematics, while showing some relative strengths in other subjects. In the most recent testing year, math proficiency was alarmingly low across all grades: just 12.5% of 6th graders, 14.6% of 7th graders, and 10.9% of 8th graders scored proficient, compared to state averages of roughly 32-33%. This is not a one-year blip; the prior year showed similarly poor results. The contrast is starkest in 8th grade, where 60.9% of students were proficient in English Language Arts on the PSAT—close to the state's 64.8%—but only 10.9% were proficient in math. This suggests the issue is subject-specific rather than a reflection of overall student ability. The school also has a notable strength in 8th-grade Social Studies, where proficiency has met or approached state averages in recent years.
Beyond test scores, the school's state ranking has declined steadily over three years, falling from the 54th percentile to the 32nd percentile. With a student-teacher ratio of 18.7 (higher than the typical national average) and per-student spending of $13,804, the school is investing above-average funds yet seeing falling results. Chronic absenteeism affects 23.3% of students—nearly one in four—which likely compounds the math struggles, since math concepts build sequentially. About 45% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. While the school is not uniformly low-performing, the inconsistency across subjects and grades points to a need for targeted math intervention and a closer look at how resources are being used to support student learning.
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