Summary:
ZIP code 53202 contains a single middle school, Lincoln Middle, which serves grades 6–8 with 309 students and is part of the Milwaukee School District at 820 E Knapp St in Milwaukee.
Because Lincoln Middle is the only middle school in this ZIP code, there are no local peer schools to compare it against; the meaningful benchmarks are the Milwaukee School District and Wisconsin overall. On the 2025–2026 Forward Exam, the school fell below both benchmarks in every tested subject and grade. Its averages were 10.40% proficient in English language arts and 3.27% in mathematics, while district averages were 27.99% and 21.39% and state averages were near 55% in both subjects. The weakest result was 7th-grade math at 1.20% proficient; in 2024–2025, 6th-grade math was an exact 0.00%. Statewide, the school ranked 628th of 643 middle schools in 2025–2026, landing in the 2nd percentile, and it has held a 0-star rating across its entire 2023–2024 through 2025–2026 rank history.
Chronic absenteeism is the clearest warning sign: 64.5% of students were chronically absent in 2024–2025, versus 46.2% in the district and 17.3% statewide. About 93.2% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch, per-student spending was $22,756, and the student-teacher ratio was 15.5. The dropout rate, by contrast, was 1.3% — below the district's 4.0% and close to the state's 1.1%. There were modest gains in 6th-grade ELA (2.90% to 8.14%) and 8th-grade ELA (11.96% to 14.43%), but 8th-grade math dropped from 11.96% to 5.15%, so the large proficiency gaps remain.
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