MPS teacher selected as 2024 State Advocate for Adult Education Fellowship

Ernice Brown, a Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) educator with 20 years’ experience, has been selected as the 2024 State Advocate for Adult Education Fellowship. For the next year, the Coalition on Adult Education will train her to become a lobbyist, someone who works with the media, policymakers and the community to advocate for change benefiting adult learners and adult education programs.

Ernice, a Milwaukee native who graduated from Milwaukee Trade and Technical High school, said she grew up with a passion for reading and she assumed that pretty much every adult could read. It wasn’t until after she became a Milwaukee Public Schools educator about 20 years ago, that she realized that wasn’t true.

“A mother came to register her five-year-old daughter for school my first year,” she said. “We were going to teach her child to read and it was obvious to me that this poor mother was not able to complete the application form to enroll her daughter without assistance.”

Ernice said her views on the importance of providing more opportunities for adult learners crystalized during the past four years that she has served as an alternative educator teaching incarcerated youth age 16-21 at the Milwaukee County Jail. Currently she said she is unable to enroll incarcerated youth who wish to pursue their high school equivalency diploma unless that person is capable of reading at the sixth-grade level.

“There are large areas of the country where if you cannot read, you cannot get a diploma,” she said. “My cause is to push for teaching reading beyond third grade. Too many students are unable to read for meaning by the end of third grade. Most of those students will just get left further and further behind. It should as no surprise when some of them wind up incarcerated.”