Detroit
Elijah Craft is a 6-foot-6-inch bear of a young man who loves playing football. Yet less than two years ago as a Detroit high school senior, he was afraid to travel more than a few blocks from home. And he was ashamed. He was 17 years old and could barely read at a first-grade level.
Everything changed for him in the fall of 2016 when he got focused reading help through one-on-one tutorials at his school. He went from the bottom of his class to graduating 25th, and he went on to college. His story nonetheless remains jarring. How can a student make it almost all the way through high school and not be able to read?
Beyond Basics, the nonprofit literacy organization that provided Craft with tutoring, estimates that 93 percent of the 50,000 children in the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) are years behind their grade level in what they can read and comprehend. Many can’t read at all. “This is a problem that has gone unaddressed for decades, impacting generations of people,” says Pam Good, president and executive director of Beyond Basics. “Ninety percent of the kids in Detroit schools can’t read the written word. It is a foreign language to them.”
Dismal reading scores sparked a lawsuit on behalf of seven Detroit students in 2016, arguing that students are being denied their right of access to literacy. But a lawsuit alone is not going to solve this illiteracy epidemic.
Elijah Craft recently spoke at a literacy summit at the city’s Mumford High School, and his message to the students in the auditorium was one from the heart. “I couldn’t read, I couldn’t do nothin’. I was in school and cheating on tests and everything. It didn’t help me one bit,” he said, sharing how learning to read changed his life. “It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication to do anything you want to put yourself into.”
Thousands of children in Detroit could use the kind of tutoring that Craft received, and estimates are that it would take about $135 million to reach them all. (Michigan spends $12 billion on K-12 public schools annually.) Beyond Basics currently works with about 500 students and can get them up to grade level in less than 12 weeks, but the program is at capacity.
Schools in large cities struggle all across the country. Yet Detroit is firmly at the bottom of the 27 urban districts measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test. This test of reading and math skills is given every other year to fourth- and eighth-grade students. Since 2009, when the federal government began comparing the largest districts, Detroit students have consistently posted the lowest scores—often by a wide margin.
In 2015, only 6 percent of students in Detroit public schools were at or above proficiency in fourth-grade reading. The average score for large districts is 27 percent.
Detroit’s students don’t fare any better on Michigan’s own standardized test. In 2017, just 9.9 percent of third graders in Detroit scored at proficient levels in language arts. That means only 332 students out of the 3,361 students assessed met grade-level expectations, says Mary Grech, a data and policy analyst with the Education Trust-Midwest, an advocacy group based in Michigan that seeks to close achievement gaps for low-income and minority students.
Detroit’s student population is 83 percent African-American and more than 50 percent live in poverty. In the last two decades, families who could leave for the suburbs did. Charter schools in Detroit have further skimmed off a large percentage of the more motivated students since the mid-1990s, when charters first opened in Michigan. More than half of Detroit’s students today attend charter schools.
They are still behind their peers around the state, but they are doing better than their counterparts in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. A recent analysis found that charter-school students scored over 20 percent proficient on the state third-grade reading test—twice the score of the traditional public school students.
And charter schools do this with less money per student. Ben DeGrow, an education-policy expert at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, has crunched the numbers, and in the 2016-17 school year, DPSCD spent about $15,000 per student, when including all state, local, and federal funding. Detroit’s charters spent about $10,000.
It’s clearly not just a funding problem.
After years of mismanagement and financial and academic failure, the state took control of the DPSCD in 2009. Over seven years, the state proved little better at running the troubled district, which edged closer and closer to bankruptcy. In 2016, the legislature stepped in and offered the DPSCD a $617 million bailout and a return to local control. Last year, a newly elected school board chose Nikolai Vitti as superintendent.
Vitti comes from a large district in Jacksonville, Florida, that he helped transform into one of the better-performing urban districts in that state.
Tackling illiteracy is one of his first goals, and he’s been going from school to school, ensuring that teachers and principals have the tools they need to both measure and address the reading deficiency. That includes implementing a new reading diagnostics test so teachers can identify the struggling students and making sure the district’s curriculum aligns with state standards.
Vitti argues that years of shifting leadership and diminishing resources led the district to become increasingly isolated and take a “survivalist approach.” And the schools alone can’t be blamed for their students’ shortfalls. The majority of the student population in Detroit falls below the poverty line. Students face tough home lives that make success at school difficult. Hunger and lack of clothing are often more pressing than academic achievement. Many kids in the city grow up in homes without a single book and with parents, often illiterate themselves, who lack the skills to read to their children.
Another pitfall is chronic absenteeism. The city’s students rank among the highest in the country for skipping class. A 2016 report found nearly 60 percent of DPSCD’s students missed at least 15 days of school.
Vitti is aware of all these factors. Looking to the future, he says he needs time to rebuild a broken system, but that he expects students to show real gains within three years. “We don’t like to talk about the impact of poverty. You start to believe that students can’t do it,” he says. “But you have to believe that all children can learn and succeed. We can’t make poverty an excuse for why the students can’t do better.”
The thousands of Detroit students who can’t read are waiting for someone to believe in them.
Ingrid Jacques is deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit News.
