Dr Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy

Dr Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy is an alternative charter school at 4030 N 29th St on Milwaukee's north side, serving about 608 students in grades PK–12 as its own district, Dr Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy Inc, which means its school numbers and district numbers are the same and there is no larger local benchmark behind them.

Its clearest strength is completion. The graduation rate was 91.2% in 2024–25, after 92.1% and 90.3% the two years before — essentially matching the state (92.0%) and roughly 20 points above the Milwaukee School District rate of 71.5%. It also far outpaces the nearest alternatives, Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning (39.2%) and Obama School of Career and Technical Education (48.3%). Dropout runs above the state each year — 1.9% in 2024–25, with a 4.5% spike in 2023–24 — and chronic absenteeism is the school's toughest problem: 53.7% of students were chronically absent in 2024–25, about three times the state rate, though that is down from 61.1% and 60.7% in the prior two years, the most encouraging trend in the data.

Test scores tell a very different story. On the 2025–26 Forward Exam, every reported subject and grade fell between 7.46% and 22.22% proficient, against state rates in the low-to-mid 50s. Tenth-grade ACT proficiency was 6.09% in ELA, 2.61% in math, and 4.35% in science. HAPA-Hmong American Peace Academy K3-12 serves a larger and more economically disadvantaged population yet reports proficiency at or above the state average with 10.4% chronic absenteeism, showing these results are not inevitable; Milwaukee Academy of Science posts nearly identical ACT results. Two caveats: the reported student-teacher ratio jumped from 12.4 to 60.8 in one year, and spending data is four years old, so treat both cautiously.