Detroit's third graders are reading better than they have in 11 years

Detroit's public school students are reading better than they have in over a decade. On the 2024-25 state assessment, the share of third graders in the Detroit Public Schools Community District who met or exceeded reading proficiency reached an 11-year high, according to the district's own results posted on detroitk12.org.

The numbers still have a long way to go. Districtwide proficiency remains low, and DPSCD third graders trail the statewide reading average by a wide margin. But the direction has changed, and an outside analysis backs up the trend. The Education Recovery Scorecard, a project of researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth, named DPSCD a 2024-25 District on the Rise in both reading and math, one of a small group of districts singled out nationally for accelerating after the pandemic. Per the scorecard, the district is now among the fastest-improving in the country.

The people running Detroit's schools point to a few specific things that are working.

The first is attendance. Chronic absenteeism in the district has been a stubborn problem for years. It has fallen by roughly 10 percentage points since the 2021-2022 school year, and the district credits an expanded attendance push, including tens of thousands of home visits in the summer of 2025. By the district's account, that made DPSCD the only large district in Michigan to pull chronic absenteeism below where it stood before the pandemic.

The second is curriculum. The district moved to a reading program built around the science of reading, the body of research on how children actually learn to decode words and make sense of text. Every school day now includes a 120-minute literacy block.

The third is interventionists. Over the past several years the district added 267 reading and multilingual interventionists focused on the early grades, kindergarten through second, working with students in small groups and inside classrooms. Those salaries were paid out of a $94.4 million settlement from the 2016 "right to read" lawsuit, in which Detroit students sued the state and argued they had been denied access to literacy itself. That money is finite, and the district has already started weighing what it keeps once the settlement runs dry.

The fourth is data. The district tracks performance closely and holds individual schools accountable for results, a discipline that was not standard practice a decade ago.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who has led the district since 2017, has framed the gains as real and worth celebrating while warning against complacency, especially with the lawsuit funding set to end. The improvement is incremental, but it is consistent, and the strategies behind it are already in place for the next class coming through.