Riverside a study in contrasts

Very good article.
I'll list some of the highlights, but one of the main points is this:
This is a "good" school for MPS, but when compared to pretty much any other school, it isn't even close. The problem: MPS students and teachers are okay with mediocre work. It's okay that every adult in the building has to ask you to go to class. The standards are not there in the community and therefore are much harder to have in school.
Then you have the fact that the kids and teachers from Riverside blame the police for what happened.
It these were such great kids they would not be assaulting cops and trying to take their weapons.
More in the depression of inner city public schools. "Good kids" in MPS are kids that try to steal cops guns.
I'm going to guess "good kids" at Nicolet have never kicked a cop in the head or tried to steal their guns.

Highlights from the article:
Like the statements made by students waiting for buses at N. Oakland Ave. and E. Locust St., the spot where trouble broke out after school Tuesday, leaving three police officers injured and seven people arrested. Many were angry at the police, who, they felt, acted too aggressively.
Like the statements made by numerous students and teachers, who said news reports unfairly blemished the reputation of the school, as if it were the media’s fault that the officers were hurt.

Riverside made it a few weeks ago on the Newsweek magazine list of the top 1,300 high schools in the U.S., one of only 21 Wisconsin schools on the list. Yet the test scores for tenth-graders this year were under statewide averages by large margins.
The school is known for the high percentage of students who take Advanced Placement courses, but it is also a place where only 61% of tenth-graders were rated as proficient or better in reading this year, compared with 74% statewide. The math figure was 42% at Riverside, 68% in Wisconsin as a whole.
To be sure, compared with other MPS high schools, and in some cases with the state as a whole, Riverside is a high performer. The graduation rate was 91% for 2005-’06, compared with 68% for MPS and 89% for the state. The school reports that 64% of graduates go on to four-year colleges, compared with 31% for MPS and 52% for the state.
Attendance is a little under 90%, 10 points above the average MPS high school, and the average score on the ACT college entrance exam in 2006-’07 was 19.2, compared with 18.0 in MPS — but 22.3 statewide.
The student body of the school is 66% African-American, 16% Hispanic, 11% white and 7% Asian.

Here is a school which is almost 90% minority, which is known for seriousness in the work of both its faculty and students, which has some of the top performing kids in Milwaukee (and a waiting list to get in) — yet, for whatever reasons, it still stands at a distance from its whiter, suburban peers when it comes to both academics and daily life.

You can see the differences inside Riverside — or just about any high school in Milwaukee — where maintaining control is a constant matter of vigilance. Principals spend their time sweeping the halls of straggling students, checking known trouble spots, monitoring the doors. Lunch periods are a time for all security hands to be on duty, keeping an eye out. Riverside Principal Dan Donder — not a small man physically — starts most class hours with a near-sprint through the hallways telling students to get moving to class.

The often-boisterous conduct of the kids and the regular presence of Milwaukee police outside the school during that period — along with occasional incidents as students leave — put elements in the atmosphere that you don’t find in more economically upscale settings.