By Jennifer Pignolet
jpignolet@detroitnews.com
Sixty-eight schools across Michigan have improved enough to be released from state academic oversight, the Michigan Department of Education announced Thursday.
That number includes 25 schools in Detroit, 23 of which are operated by Detroit Public Schools Community District. It also includes 33 that were in partnership agreements with the state, which facilitates additional supports for those schools.
“The Michigan Department of Education is committed to working with districts to improve student achievement and graduation rates,” Interim State Superintendent Sue Carnell said in a statement. “I am very pleased to see that 68 schools — including 33 out of 98 schools that were in partnership agreements with MDE — no longer require additional supports from the department because of the hard work by local district and intermediate school district staff, children, parents, community members and MDE employees.”
A total of 240 schools will now be under state oversight, designated “Comprehensive Support and Improvement Schools” (CSI) due to their full building’s performance, for at least the next two years. That includes 26 from the Detroit school district.
Some of the 240 were newly added to that list Thursday, while others were carried over from the previous one and did not show enough improvement to be released from oversight. The list includes charter schools and traditional public schools, as well as alternative and online schools.
The identification of schools needing to show improvement is a requirement by the federal government under the Every Student Succeeds Act. States must identify struggling schools and require plans for intervention or support.
Michigan has three lists that identify low-performing schools. The CSI list is the most serious one, made up of schools showing building-wide struggles. Schools can qualify as CSI by either performing in the bottom 5% on state tests or, for high schools, having a four-year graduation rate of 67% or below. The other two lists deal with the performance of one or more subgroups of students within the school.
The state releases the CSI list every three years, and the eligibility is based on state test performance but also takes into account factors like student growth year to year and the progress of English language learners. Each school earns an index score based on seven factors, and then all schools are ranked by an index score to find the bottom 5%. A high school could qualify to be on the list for its graduation rate, its index score or both.
The Michigan Department of Education will have a total of 57 partnerships with local school districts, assisting a total of 113 schools that were on Thursday’s CSI list. Those districts will receive additional support from MDE and their intermediate school districts to develop 18- and 36-month benchmark goals for improvement.
The Downriver and Wayne County districts that have at least one school on the CSI list were:
- Dearborn City School District
- Detroit Public Schools Community District
- Garden City Public Schools
- Gibraltar School District
- School District of the City of Hamtramck
- The School District of the City of Harper Woods
- Huron Valley Schools
- Redford Union Schools
- School District of the City of River Rouge
- Romulus Community Schools
