School officials in Detroit plan to begin paying high school students to attend after-school literacy classes, citing data that shows more than half of 8th graders are two years or more behind.
The Detroit Public Schools Community District is still developing the program that board member Misha Stallworth told Chalkbeat Detroit spawned from a finance committee meeting on ways to spend literacy lawsuit money on early grade students.
Proceeds from a “right to read” lawsuit filed by former students in 2016 will not be used to fund efforts at the high school, which will instead rely on leftover federal COVID funding for learning recovery, WXYZ reports.
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“When we think about this literacy lawsuit and the origins of it, the question that was coming to mind for me is, how do we focus on those students that kind of missed out on some of the changes that younger students have been able to benefit from,” Stallworth said.
Spring 2024 end of year assessments show 53.9% of DPSCD eight graders tested at reading levels two or more grades behind, though the figure had declined by 5% from the year prior.
DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told Chalkbeat the move toward paying students to attend tutoring is necessary to counter the “negative impact emergency management had on student achievement.”
The “right to read” lawsuit claimed state-appointed emergency managers who took over the dysfunctional district between 2009 and 2017 created conditions that contributed to the district’s abysmal reading scores, though academics in Detroit have lagged for decades.
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Jamarr Gatewood, father of a Cass Tech senior, told described the district’s 8th grade reading proficiency as “crazy.”
“That’s definitely an issue, because if they’re not learning that, then they’re going to be too far behind,” he said.
“We’re talking about, off the top of my head, a couple thousand students that’ll fall into that category,” Vitti told WXYZ, pointing to high student absenteeism, packed high school schedules, and other factors playing contributing to the problem.
“It’s an important point to note that if students miss nine or fewer days of school, they’re three to five times more likely to be at and above grade level in early elementary and middle school and three to five times more likely to be college ready in literacy,” Vitti said. “Nearly 60% of our students miss 18 or more days a year.”
Gabrielle Groce, a Detroit English teacher, told Chalkbeat she’s in favor of paying students to attend intervention sessions if that’s what it takes to get them extra help.
“I just want, especially our Black and brown kids, to be able to succeed,” she said. “If this helps them, or helps push them to be better through literacy, then I’m 100% on board with it.”
Elizabeth Birr Moje, dean of the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan, believes there’s risks that come with bribing students with external incentives, but success could ultimately hinge on who is teaching the tutoring sessions.
DPSCD has not decided whether to use staff or a third party for the program, nor have officials determined which schools will participate, or how much students will get paid. It also remains unclear when, exactly, the program will launch, with officials suggesting sometime this fall.
“The best outcomes from tutoring are high-dosage tutoring offered by a trained tutor, and preferably a certified teacher, and that’s just for general tutoring,” Moje said. “So if we’re talking about helping someone who really needs those reading supports, then they’re really going to need to have people who know what they’re doing and not simply volunteers.”
The program to pay Detroit students to learn is the latest in efforts to address drastic learning loss and chronic absenteeism in Michigan schools following Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s decision to close schools for nearly a year during the pandemic.
In Detroit, where two thirds of students are chronically absent, officials recently installed laundry machines at more than half of the district’s 108 schools to help kids from less privileged households to come to class with clean clothes, Fox News reports.
While Michigan has the 7th highest student absenteeism rate in the nation, other states are struggling with the same issue.
In Ohio, lawmakers briefly considered spending $1.5 million over the next two years to pay students to attend class and graduate from high school, though the legislation stalled out in a House committee, WOUB reports.