The Detroit Public School District has been under the direct authority of the State of Michigan for 11 of the past 15 years. But the students in Plaintiffs’ schools still fall far behind students in the rest of the country, Michigan, and even the District. Detroit students are on average 2.3 grade levels below their actual grade in reading proficiency.

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Detroit Public School District is also one of the very lowest performing districts in Michigan, and the schools at issue in this case have been assigned a zero to sixth percentile ranking in the state.

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Students in the Detroit Public School District are also overwhelmingly African-American or Latino and socioeconomically disadvantaged, far more so than students in most other districts in Michigan. In fact, Detroit is bounded by the most segregating school district boundary in the country.

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Achievement data shows that students in Plaintiffs’ schools have proficiency scores that hover around zero.

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The achievement scores for the Detroit Public School District remain the lowest of any big city in the nation; Detroit has reported the lowest proficiency scores of any big city on all of the last four National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing cycles.

 

Indeed, on the most recent NAEP test, only 4% of Detroit Public School fourth grade students scored proficient or above in math, and only 5% scored proficient or above in reading. Only 5% of Detroit Public School eighth grade students scored proficient or above in math, and only 7% scored proficient or above in reading. No fourth or eighth grade students in the Detroit Public School system performed at the advanced level in reading or math.