LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The Education Trust-Midwest is a left-leaning research organization that supports more spending on public schools. It recently released a report that stated minority students from low-income backgrounds don’t have as much access to highly qualified teachers as their white peers in Michigan’s K-12 schools.

The report’s findings.

However, the report’s findings are refuted by the school districts cited in the report. Those school districts say their teachers are almost all of high quality based on teacher evaluations.

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The Education Trust-Midwest report stated, “The findings paint a troubling picture across Michigan’s classrooms, demonstrating how Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds have far less access to credentialed, highly qualified teachers, experience far greater teacher mobility, and have access to far fewer experienced teachers than their white peers.”

School district examples.

In addition, the Education Trust-Midwest report gives five school districts as an example of districts with a high percentage of students in poverty who would have less access to highly effective teachers: Godfrey-Lee Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools Community District, Whittemore-Prescott Area Schools, Muskegon Public Schools, and Hartford Public Schools.

But according to teacher evaluations conducted by the school districts, their teachers received high marks.
For example, in 2023-24 Godfrey-Lee, Whittemore-Prescott, Muskegon and Hartford’s school districts had a combined 523 teachers who were evaluated and not a single teacher within those four school districts received an “ineffective” rating. Teachers in 2023-24 were rated in four categories: Highly Effective, Effective, Minimally Effective and Ineffective.

Highly effective or effective.

In fact, those four school districts reported almost all of their teachers fell within the top two ratings – either highly effective or effective.

Hartford had all of its teachers rated as either highly effective or effective followed by Muskegon (96%), Godfrey-Lee (94%), and Whittemore Prescott (94%).As for Detroit Public Schools Community District, it rated 44% of its teachers as “highly effective”, with 50% “effective.” Despite the district’s poor academic performance, just five of Detroit’s 2,898 teachers evaluated were found to be “ineffective,” which was statistically zero percent.