State GOP have found a way to make reading retention law worse

[Sherry Warden]

by Nancy Kaffer, Columnist, Detroit Free Press

I don’t understand what’s going on with Republicans in Lansing right now, which, really,

makes it a day ending in y.  This time, a state Senate committee is finally moving to suspend the state’s third grade reading retention law for the current school year. But they’re doing it wrong. Passed five years ago, the third grade reading retention law does what it says on the box: requires schools to hold back third graders who aren’t reading at grade level. Last year’s third graders would have been the first class subject to the retention requirement, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Legislature suspended the requirement for that school year. It was the right thing to do, and it’s the right thing this year, too. Some kids have been in face-to-face school, while others have spent the year learning online, or moving between virtual and in-person classrooms. Very few kids have had a normal year — but somehow, our GOP state senators have figured out how to make it worse. Senate Bill 265, reviewed in committee Wednesday, would suspend the third grade retention requirement, all right. But thanks to a last-minute substitution so completely wrong-headed that the bill’s original sponsor, Sen. Jon Bumstead (R-Newaygo), pulled his name from it — trust me, this is high policy
drama — the bill doubles down for next year, requiring schools to fail third and fourth graders who aren’t reading at grade level. Despite Bumstead urging his GOP colleagues
to vote against the altered bill, it passed the committee, and now heads to the full Senate for a vote. Bumstead isn’t the only one who opposes the hijacked bill. A long list of public school district leaders and educators’ professional associations are against it, too.
The retention law sounds great in theory. It’s impossible to argue that kids shouldn’t be
reading on grade level. Reading proficiency is incredibly important as school gets harder,
and more self-directed. But it’s also impossible to look past the social and emotional harm to kids who are held back, or to imagine that the comparative peanuts Michigan legislators have allocated to boost literacy is sufficient to do the job. In practice, this law is a giant mess, so unwieldy and ill-conceived that even before the pandemic, policy makers and educators were working diligently to circumvent it. Roughly half of Michigan kids don’t score proficient on the annual M-STEP reading exam, a logistically impossible number that I have to think caused a serious freakout. So the Michigan Department of Education found a different standard — one that would require fewer kids to be held back. Now, only the department requires that only those who score in the bottom 5% on the M-STEP must be retained. This year, that’s about 2,700 third graders, the Detroit News’ Jennifer Chambers reported this week. Letters have already gone out to those students’ parents, warning that their child is at risk of retention. There’s no question that students in majority Black and brown communities will be disproportionately
affected. The law offers plenty of loopholes for parents who want their child to advance, like requests for alternate assessment or promotion based on a portfolio of work. Educators like Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti
have said they don’t plan to retain kids this year; last year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer offered
resources for parents looking to avoid their child’s retention.

And it’s time to understand something: This law was extremely bad policy before the

pandemic. It is disastrous policy now. The harm done to our kids by the pandemic’s
mish-mash education won’t be erased in a year, or two, or three. To subject those children to retention is cruel — and, if your goal is to actually improve educational outcomes for Michigan kids, it’s counterproductive. There are pretty obvious ways to improve Michigan’s failing public school system: Support teachers. Pay them more. Adopt consistent standards. Ensure districts have the teaching materials and other resources required to educate children to meet those standards. Properly fund schools, using a tiered model that accounts for the higher costs of educating kids who face more challenges. Those are the remedies documented in report after report. They’re also the remedies our GOP-led Legislature continues to disregard, favoring top-down, punitive reforms that presume oversight, not lack of resources, is the problem. You’d think, maybe, that as Michigan’s test scores slip year after year, lawmakers might have learned something.