Ms. Whitmer says children were out of classrooms only three months, but she may be suffering from her own math deficit. Many of the districts that stayed closed the longest, including Ann Arbor, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Detroit, have large minority populations. During the 2020-2021 school year, Ann Arbor offered in-person instruction a mere 11.4% of the time, according to data-analytics company Burbio, which tracked school shutdowns. Lansing was closed more than Ann Arbor, and in Kalamazoo students learned via Zoom all year.
A study by Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative found that “students in districts that did not offer in-person instruction at any time during the 2020-21 school year were the least likely to achieve a typical year’s growth and the most likely to demonstrate no growth in either year, though performance gaps shrunk substantially once most districts returned to in-person learning in 2021-22. Improvements in growth outcomes between 2020-21 to 2021-22 were consistently larger for students who received in-person instruction in 2021-22.”
In 2022 only 32% of all Michigan fourth graders were proficient in math while 71% achieved only “basic.” The reading numbers were even worse, with 58% of fourth graders at or above basic and only 28% proficient.
Many states closed schools out of caution at the beginning of the pandemic and test scores fell nationwide. But Michigan schools didn’t reopen for longer than many places, and Gov. Whitmer opposed a plan that would have made it a priority to open schools for K-5 students. According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, by September 2020 only 460,000 public school students (about 35% of the total school population) had a chance to return to classroom learning full time while the rest were stuck with online or hybrid instruction.