Elementary students who don’t know how to read by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. They have a significantly higher chance of going to jail, of living in poverty, and of never marrying.
Unfortunately, that’s the future 60% of Michigan’s fourth graders now face, thanks to state leaders who deprived them of classroom learning for nearly a year during the pandemic and then passed a law removing standards that required young students to be able to read proficiently before moving on to the next grade.
The results for this year’s Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (MSTEP) are the worst in the test’s history. Just 40% of third graders statewide passed the state’s English language arts (ELA) test last spring. The numbers are even worse for minority and low-income students: 86% of black fourth-grade students in the state don’t know how to read, according to a state Senate Education Committee hearing earlier this year.
Michigan state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet was shocked by this number, asking, “Did I hear you say that 86% of African American students in Michigan in the fourth grade are not proficient in reading? Did you say 86%?”
But she shouldn’t have been. It was her party, after all, that made these numbers possible.
The third and fourth graders failing the MSTEP this year were kindergartners and first graders when Gov. Whitmer shut them out of their schools and forced them to “learn” online. These children were deprived of an in-person education at the age when kids need it most. Ages 5-7 are considered by the vast majority of education experts as critical for building reading skills.
Even state Superintendent Michael Rice admitted Whitmer’s school closures were to blame. “This year’s scores… show that, on average, being educated remotely during the 2020-21 school year rather than in-person during the pandemic affected progress. Being in the learning-to-read window—in preschool or early elementary grades—when COVID-19 hit also affected assessment results on average,” he said.
That’s the understatement of the year.
Adding insult to injury, in 2021, Whitmer vetoed $155 million in proposed spending for reading scholarships geared toward low-income students struggling with learning loss—spending that would have been entirely funded by federal COVID-19 aid already assigned to the state.
If Michigan parents were not already convinced at this point that the Democrats in Lansing didn’t care about their students’ progress, the Democrats cleared that up for them in 2023, when they voted to strike a key reading requirement from state law. That requirement made sure third graders could demonstrate basic reading proficiency before moving on to fourth grade. It also made sure schools were tracking struggling readers and providing early intervention.
The reasoning was that holding schools and students accountable in this way is discriminatory, because most of the students being held back by this requirement were black. Well, if we are playing that game, lockdown orders were also discriminatory, since the majority of students negatively affected by them were black. So was Whitmer’s decision to veto additional funding for reading scholarships, as those scholarships would have been primarily aimed at low-income minority households.
Democrats have justified all of this by throwing more money at school districts. In the past five years alone, they’ve increased spending on early literacy efforts by more than $40 million, much of which has gone toward hiring more school employees and providing additional training for teachers. And what does Michigan have to show for it? Test results that get worse every year and a growing number of students who are being set up for a lifetime of failure.
Michiganders need to face the facts: The state’s education system is broken, and whatever lawmakers are doing to fix it isn’t working. The only solution might be to get rid of the people who broke the system in the first place.
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.
