U S Grant School

U S Grant School is a PK–8 school serving 585 students on Milwaukee's near south side, part of Milwaukee School District, which ranks 418th of 432 districts in Wisconsin. Statewide, U S Grant School ranks 978th of 1,039 elementary and middle schools — the 6th percentile, with 0 stars. That's not new: across ten reported years it has never risen above the 12th percentile, holding in a narrow 6–12% band and earning 0 stars every year but one. About 96% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Most nearby schools land in the same bottom-decile band: Rogers Street Academy, Longfellow Elementary and Forest Home Elementary rank essentially tied with Grant, and Doerfler Elementary and Mitchell Elementary rank below it. Three neighbors clearly outrank it — Rocketship Southside Community Prep, ALBA - Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes and Seeds of Health Elementary Program. A striking contrast: Grant spends $18,657 per student, the least of any MPS school in this cluster, while Forest Home Elementary spends $7,842 more and ranks in the same place. Across grades 3–8, Grant averages roughly 21% proficient in ELA and 16% in math, against state averages near 54%. Attendance is a relative bright spot: chronic absenteeism is 34.5%, better than the district's 46.2% and down from 52.6% three years ago.

Grant is not uniformly weak. Its middle grades outperform its early grades — 7th-grade math has beaten the district average three years running and led every MPS neighbor in 2025-26 — while 4th grade is the deepest trough, at 8.57% math and 11.59% ELA. Results also differ sharply by student group: Grant's African American students rank around the 70th percentile statewide with 4 stars, the only 4-star result in the school's data and far above its overall rank, while several other groups sit in the single digits. For families, the picture is a school improving on attendance and some grade levels while overall achievement remains about a third of the state rate.