Amanda Forrester / news@whmi.com

Experts say the school closures caused by COVID-19 had a negative impact on the reading abilities of many students across Michigan.

Third and fourth graders around the state completed the M-STEP, a test which measures various benchmarks for learning. The scores for students in the 2023-2024 school year were “sharply lower” than the scores from the 2018-2019 school year, according to a press release from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Test scores from last year were also higher than the 2023-2024 year.

Third grade students taking the test in the 2023-2024 school year were kindergarteners in 2020-2021, at the height of the pandemic.

“Michigan schools were closed much longer than many other states, including many of our neighboring states,” Molly Macek, Director of Education Policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Relations, said. “Many schools were closed most of if not all of the 2020-2021 school year. Some were even closed part of the following year.”

According to the press release, Governor Whitmor “vetoed three pieces of legislation that would have helped families cover the cost of tutoring, enrichment programs and literacy coaches.”

“Michigan schools received an unprecedented amount of federal COVID funding, $6 billion in federal funding,” Macek said. “This equated to an average of about $4,600 per student. In the poorest districts they were receiving significantly more than that. In a study we recently published at the Mackinac Center, a lot of those funds were used to increase the compensation for existing employees, or their administrators or administrating staff. We’re finding very little evidence of those funds being used for interventions that would have directly influenced student learning and helped them recover these learning losses.”

Macek said that there are several pieces of legislation introduced to support literacy, but for students currently being tested, the intervention may be too late.

“There have been some types of legislation introduced to help literacy, but it’s too late at this point to help those kids that were learning how to read and developing those skills during the heart of the pandemic,” Macek said. “There were different forms of legislation that were introduced that would have helped parents have access to tutoring and other academic supports that could’ve helped our kids recover learning losses. Now kids are so far behind, that it’s going to be really difficult to implement anything that will have a significant impact in a short amount of time.”

More information about the Mackinac Center can be found at the links below.