Detroit third graders just hit an 11-Year reading high. The strategy that got them there has four parts.

Detroit's public school students are reading better than they have in over a decade. Third graders hit an 11-year high in reading proficiency on state assessments in 2025, and independent researchers found that Detroit students are gaining ground in reading and math faster than students in comparable districts across the country.

The numbers still have distance to cover. About 15 percent of students district-wide scored proficient or higher in reading on the 2025 state test, and roughly 12 percent in math. But the direction of those numbers is changing, and the people running Detroit's schools point to four specific things that are working.

The first is attendance. Chronic absenteeism in the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been a persistent obstacle. In the 2021-2022 school year, nearly 77 percent of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10 percent or more of the school year. Last school year, that figure was down to 61 percent. The drop is real. First grade teacher Samantha Ciaffone, who has taught in Detroit for seven years, said that before the recent push she would regularly have seven or eight students absent on any given day. Now she sees one or two.

The second is curriculum. The district moved toward a reading program aligned with the science of reading, an approach grounded in research on how the brain actually learns to decode and understand text.

The third is interventionists. Over the past three years, the district added 267 reading and multilingual interventionists focused on kindergarten through second grade, working with students in small groups and directly in classrooms. Students who worked with interventionists showed more improvement on district literacy assessments than their peers. The salaries for those positions came from a $94.4 million legal settlement, awarded after students sued the state in 2016 claiming they had been denied a quality education and specifically the right to learn to read.

Every school day now includes a 120-minute literacy block across the district.

The fourth is data. The district tracks academic performance closely and holds schools accountable for results in ways that were not standard practice a decade ago.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who has led the district since 2017, said the progress should be celebrated without creating complacency. The research confirming Detroit's gains comes from an independent analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth drawing on state and national test scores.

The work is not finished. But Detroit's third graders are reading better than they have since 2014, and the strategies behind that improvement are already in place for the next class coming through.