Improvements in Michigan’s Public Schools Highlighted During State Board Meeting

Progress in Areas Including Graduation Rates, Advanced Placement Success, and Career and Technical Education Completion

LANSING – Record highs in graduation rates, Advanced Placement success, and Career and Technical Education program completers are among the recent improvements made by Michigan public schools.

These gains have occurred due to hard work by students, local school and intermediate school district staff, parents, and communities with support from the legislature, Governor Whitmer, the Michigan Department of Education, and the State Board of Education.

During today’s State Board of Education meeting, State Superintendent Dr. Michael F. Rice shared the recent progress made by Michigan schools.

“We are excited by the many improvements,” Dr. Rice said. “We applaud our students and educators for their accomplishments. At the same time that we celebrate historic highs in several areas of the Top 10 Strategic Education Plan, much work remains to improve how our schools educate and support our children, particularly in early literacy. We can and must do better for the sake of Michigan’s children.

“No single metric defines public education,” he said. “That’s why we have multiple goals in Michigan’s Top 10 Strategic Education Plan and multiple metrics for the goals.”

State Board of Education President Dr. Pamela Pugh said the improvements are what the board had in mind when it updated and approved the plan in August 2020. “We continue to make progress toward the eight goals in the Top 10 Strategic Education Plan,” Dr. Pugh said. “The board is committed to providing support to our students and educators and to advocating with the governor and legislature for policies that will improve student achievement.”

Michigan’s improvements include:

• A record-high graduation rate. Michigan’s 2024 four-year graduation rate improved to the highest level since the state adopted the federal formula for calculating the rate in 2008, according to data released last month. The four-year graduation rate of 82.8% increased from 81.8% in 2023. The new data represent progress toward Goal 5 in the strategic plan, to increase the percentage of all students who graduate from high school.
  
  
• Record-high rate of postsecondary credential attainment, the percentage of Michigan adults ages 25 to 64 with a credential beyond a high school diploma. That percentage has reached 51.8% as the state works toward the governor’s Sixty by 30 Goal (60% of adults ages 25-64 with a college degree or skill certificate by 2030) and Goal 6, to increase the percentage of adults with a postsecondary credential.
  
  
• More students enrolling in Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes and a record percentage completing CTE programs. During the last three years, the number of CTE completers—students who took an entire program of study rather than a single CTE course or two—increased, by almost 8,400 students, or 19 percent, to 52,625, the highest level in Michigan history. In the 2023-24 school year, 112,156 students enrolled in Career and Technical Education programs, the third year of increases totaling more than 9,000 students, or 9%, since the 2020-21 school year. These improvements contribute to Goal 4 in the strategic plan, to expand secondary learning opportunities for all students.

• Increased participation and completion by Michigan high school students in rigorous Advanced Placement courses and better performance on Advanced Placement exams, which also are Goal 4 metrics. In the last two years, Advanced Placement participation in Michigan has increased by 12.3%. The number of students taking 1 or more Advanced Placement tests topped 63,000. The number of AP tests taken was almost 111,000. The number of students scoring a 3,4, or 5—scores that often qualify for college credit—exceeded 44,000. The number of AP tests with a 3, 4, or 5 topped 77,000. These are all historic highs in Michigan.

  Student participation in other rigorous secondary school programs also has increased. Early middle college participants were just shy of 16,000, the highest in state history. Participants in dual enrollment who take college and high school courses at the same time passed 35,000 students, the highest number in at least the last decade.
  
  

• Great Start Readiness Program enrollment exceeding 40,000 students, the highest in the state’s history. Expanding early learning opportunities is Goal 1.
  
  
• Improvements on state test scores. Michigan students performed better than last year in most grades and in most subjects on state assessments, according to 2024 M-STEP and SAT/PSAT scores. The percentage of students who scored as proficient or advanced increased on 13 of 20 tests, was the same on one test, and decreased on six tests. Improvements were particularly noteworthy on the state-administered M-STEP math tests, with Michigan’s students improving at all grades tested on the M-STEP—grades 3-7—for the second year in a row. These results continue the progress from 2023, when Michigan students improved on 15 of 20 assessments. Over the last two years, Michigan students have improved in math, science, and social studies.

Despite those improvements, the test results show more work is needed to improve students’ reading and writing skills. The percentage of students at or above proficiency on the English Language Arts tests improved in grades 5, 7, and 8, remained the same in grade 6 and decreased in grades 3, 4, and 11. For some children, particularly those who were learning to read when COVID-19 hit and who were remote, by district or parent choice the first full school year of the pandemic, the pandemic had an especially adverse impact. For example, last year’s students in grades 3 and 4 had lower percentages of students reading at or above proficiency than the students in the same grade the year before. These students would have been at the beginning stages of learning to read – in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten – when their schooling was interrupted by the pandemic.

Among the initiatives that have contributed to the progress and are expected to result in further improvements are:

• Increased and more equitable school funding from the governor and legislature. The fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024 budgets were Michigan’s strongest education budgets in the last 30 years and the fiscal year 2025 budget had significant investments in helping at-risk students. Providing adequate and equitable school funding is Goal 8 in Michigan’s Top 10 Strategic Education Plan. These funding increases included additional dollars to provide school mental health and safety supports. Despite the great progress in school funding, though, Michigan continues to underfund schools by billions of dollars, according to the parameters of the 2018 study of the School Finance Research Collaborative, because of more than two decades of underfunding prior to the strong state school aid budgets in the last three fiscal years. Indeed, Michigan was dead last in the country in total revenue growth, inflation adjusted, for the period between 1995 and 2015, and third to last in per pupil revenue growth, inflation adjusted, for the same period.
  
  
• New literacy/dyslexia laws and other literacy efforts. In September, the state legislature passed and the governor signed into law some of the most important education-related legislation in Michigan in decades. The laws are critically important to improving the ability of Michigan children to read. They will strengthen the effectiveness of literacy instruction and intervention for Michigan students and provide for both pre-service and in-service training to educators to learn or strengthen skills needed to identify Michigan students with characteristics of dyslexia. In addition, 3,600 educators in the state have finished Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) training on instruction in the science of reading, with another 6,500 working toward completion. MDE is asking the legislature to make LETRS training mandatory for grades K-5 teachers. Improving early literacy is Goal 2 in the strategic plan.

  Beyond making LETRS training mandatory for all K-5 classroom teachers, the legislature could help additionally in three more ways: (1) greater funds for high-quality early literacy instructional materials in Section 35m, which would help districts jumpstart the work to implement elements of the new literacy law, (2) funding for low class sizes in high poverty K-3 classrooms, and (3) fewer exceptions to the statutorily required 180 days of in-person instruction and by extension more time for our students to learn. The legislature chipped away at student instructional time and in-person student instructional time in the last six years.  It needs to rectify these errors in the state school aid act this year.
  
  

• The state’s efforts to address the teacher shortage. Michigan has gained national recognition for its efforts in this area. Teacher preparation enrollment in Michigan has rebounded from a 59% decrease from 2011-12 through 2016-17 to a 71% increase from 2016-17 through 2022-23. Efforts to attract more people to pursue a teaching career in Michigan include, but are not limited to, scholarships to future educators; stipends for student teachers; student loan repayments; Future Proud Michigan Educator EXPLORE grants; the Future Proud Michigan Educator LAUNCH program; Grow Your Own grant programs to help support staff and students to become teachers; Talent Together; expedited reciprocity for teachers and counselors certified in other states; a rural credentialing hub; and tuition reimbursement for special education teachers. Increasing the number of certified teachers in areas of shortage is Goal 7 in the strategic plan.

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