Detroit charter students’ test scores show progress and room for improvement

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Charter schools, where Detroit children make up at least half of the student body, showed progress on standardized tests in Michigan, although their results lag statewide numbers and are below pre-pandemic numbers.

In English language arts, 20.6% of students scored proficient or better on the 2024 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP). This result was more than 2 percentage points higher than the 2021-22 school year, but almost 4 percentage points lower than the 2018-19 school year.

Statewide, 44.5% had proficient or better proficiency, according to the Michigan Department of Education.

In mathematics, 9.7% of students performed at least well, an improvement of 1.8 percentage points compared to the 2021/22 school year. But that number is lower than the pre-pandemic number for the 2018-19 school year, when 14% of students performed well or better. Statewide, 35.1% tested at this level.

Detroit has one of the highest proportions of students attending charter schools in the country, with about half of the city’s children, about 50,000 students, attending charter classrooms.

Chalkbeat’s analysis of charter test results includes schools in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties where Detroit students make up at least half of the student body. The state classifies a student’s performance on the Michigan standardized test as advanced, proficient, partially proficient or non-proficient. For this analysis, Chalkbeat looked at the percentage of students whose test scores were proficient or advanced.

Charters, which are independently managed public schools, often rely on management companies to oversee day-to-day operations or handle key functions such as balancing bills or hiring teachers.

In Michigan, most charters are managed by for-profit companies that are not subject to public disclosure about how they spend money on behalf of schools or how much they profit from it. Institutions such as community colleges, universities, and school districts have the ability to approve charters, which means they approve charter applications and monitor schools’ compliance with their contracts.

Some education advocates have cited a lack of accountability and transparency among these licensing boards as a persistent problem in the sector.

Earlier this year, the State Board of Education passed a resolution calling on state lawmakers to pass legislation that would strengthen oversight and accountability in the state’s statutes.

Detroit’s charters typically perform better academically than the city’s traditional public schools, although gains are minimal, and a 2023 study found that the Detroit Public Schools Community District enrolls a higher percentage of students from families who live in deep poverty.

Michigan students in grades 3 through 7 take standardized tests in English and math. Fifth graders are also tested in science and social studies, and eighth graders take the PSAT (the SAT pre-test) for English and math. High school students take various exams depending on their grade level, including the PSAT and SAT.

Detroit charter school students also saw gains in science and social studies.

In science, 15.4% of charter students tested in the subject were proficient or above, an increase of nearly 4 percentage points from the 2021-22 school year. (No data is available for the 2018-19 school year, before the pandemic, when the Michigan Department of Education withheld science test results.)

In the social sciences, charter students saw small increases — and they easily exceeded pre-pandemic results. However, the overall proportion of students who at least passed the examination remained low at 4.3%.

Detroit students face a number of barriers to academic success, including housing insecurity, concentrated poverty and structural racism. The majority of Detroit charter students come from low-income households, which plays a critical role in their academic performance.

“Poverty has consistently had a significant, negative impact on student academic performance,” State Superintendent Michael Rice said in a recent news release about the state test results.

Tara Kilbride, deputy associate director of the Education Policy Initiative Collaborative at Michigan State University, said in a recent interview with Chalkbeat that even a one percentage point increase is notable when you consider the number of children in Detroit who are still on their Working towards skills.

“That one percentage point gets students to a point where they can do more and have more basic skills, whereas one percentage point somewhere else means students are further along,” she said.

Broken down by grade level, the test results show that younger students whose early years of school were affected by the COVID pandemic performed several percentage points below the overall average. In English language arts, for example, 16.8% of fourth graders achieved proficient or better performance, compared to 20.6% overall.

The challenges facing young students in Detroit charters reflect some broader trends across Michigan. At the state level, 43.3% of fourth graders demonstrated at least proficiency in English when tested.

Meanwhile, 38% of eighth-grade charter students in Detroit had proficient or better English proficiency. Nationally, that number was 64.5%.

Chalkbeat contacted representatives from some of Detroit’s largest city charter approvers, including Central Michigan University and Grand Valley State, but both declined to comment. Daniel Quisenberry, president of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, did not respond to a request for comment.

Taking out “small parts of the overall accountability problem” in Detroit’s statutes

Tinu Usoro has three children who attend charter schools in Detroit, including a second-grader with disabilities.

Last year, Usoro’s daughter received a certificate for improving her standardized test scores, but Usoro questioned whether her daughter’s results truly reflected learning success.

“I don’t feel like she’s learning the things she needs to learn,” Usoro said.

Students with disabilities consistently fare poorly in Detroit charters, following a trend in Michigan and across the country. According to the state Department of Education, only 4.8% of charter students with disabilities in Detroit had proficient or better English proficiency, compared to 15% nationally.

Students with disabilities and English language learners nationwide are having a difficult time recovering from the cascading effects of the pandemic, according to a new report from Arizona State University titled “The State of the American Student 2024.”

“Many parents have struggled to assume the role of educator during the pandemic, particularly with children with disabilities who lacked essential services such as speech therapy,” the report said. “Schools often failed to provide adequate support and many families were unaware of their rights to compensation for missed support.”

Charter school mom Sade Williams said the only reason her children have been doing well during the pandemic is because she was able to stay home during school closures to help them learn.

“I’m a pretty hands-on parent. So if there’s a problem, I’m usually there to help,” she said.

Usoro said the way schools can help students get back on their feet depends on things like transparency and accountability — two things she’s trying to strengthen in Detroit’s charter.

She leads a charter school committee through local nonprofit 482Forward that is made up of parents, educators, retired teachers and community members who take on “small pieces of the overall accountability problem,” Usoro said.

They recently created an interactive tool that lists charter schools and things like the schools’ permittees and demographics. The committee suggested developing a similar tool for the state Department of Education website that would display this information for all charters across the state. They received $150,000 in federal funding to launch the tool, which is scheduled to be implemented later this year.

Compared to traditional public schools, “with charters, it’s very nuanced,” Usoro said of the quality of each school. This means that the test results also contain nuances.

Robyn Vincent is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit, covering Detroit schools and Michigan education policy. You can reach them at [email protected]