Stella Rodriguez, a teacher at Ann Arbor Open School, believes kids need to “fall in love” with reading. | Photo: Annie Comperchio

Part one of a series on literacy in Ann Arbor.

In June, the personal finance site Wallet-Hub named Ann Arbor the “most educated city in America” for the ninth consecutive year. The ranking cites the city’s large number of residents with college degrees and its highly rated public schools.

But despite the positive publicity, standardized test scores show that many Ann Arbor–area kids are struggling with reading proficiency. According to results released last year from the 2024–25 Michigan Student Test of Education Progress, only 56 percent of AAPS third-graders met or exceeded proficiency standards in English Language Arts. It was the lowest proficiency rate since Michigan started administering the M-STEP in 2015, and marked an 11 percentage point drop from the pre-pandemic 2018–19 rate.

Related: “Learning Lag” (Oct. 2025)

Experts consider third-grade reading proficiency to be a key education benchmark, as it’s the stage when students begin to need strong reading skills to master other subjects—that is, when kids shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

The yearslong decline, which mirrors a statewide trend, prompted a rethinking of how to teach reading in AAPS, including a shift to new curriculum materials and more access to training for educators. Officials hope to see the benefits of these changes begin to show up this month, when final results from the 2025–26 M-STEP are released.

State officials are looking for a similar turnaround, after years of declining results due in part to the pandemic. On a key national study known as the Nation’s Report Card, Michigan was ranked forty-fourth in the U.S. for fourth-grade reading in 2024—dropping eight places since 2019.

In response, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has made student literacy one of her top priorities for the remainder of her term. In July, the state legislature passed the 2027 school-aid budget, which includes $502 million in funding for literacy initiatives.

The New Curriculum: Arts & Letters

Of course, there’s not just one cause for the downturn in scores. The third graders tested in 2024–25 were kindergartners when AAPS returned to full-time in-school instruction in 2021 after the pandemic eased, so many of them missed out on the early exposure to reading that happens in preschool.

In Ann Arbor, the district is “still recovering” from pandemic disruptions, says Dawn Linden, AAPS assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. One of these is a lingering problem with absenteeism (“Out of Class,” Mar. 2026), which she says is a “strong contributor” to the lower test outcomes. She notes that building administrators are carefully monitoring chronically absent students and “working really hard to make sure that the classroom experience is something they want to be there for.”

Related: “Out of Class” (Mar. 2026)

Linden says classroom engagement is a “strong part” of the district’s new K–5 reading and writing curriculum, Arts & Letters, which was rolled out during the 2025–26 school year. The curriculum is part of an approved list of evidence-based reading curricula that the Michigan Department of Education developed under Michigan’s 2024 K–12 literacy/dyslexia laws. The program costs $1.5 million over five years. The district has secured $1.2 million in MDE grants for the first three, and the remainder may come from the general fund or additional grants.

AAPS has “taken real advantage of the MDE grants to make our changes and our transformation in reading instruction to be fully aligned to the science of reading, which is the most effective way to teach children how to read,” says Linden.

The “science of reading” approach emphasizes early phonics instruction and draws on cognitive science. Previously, AAPS used a “balanced literacy” curriculum, with materials from Fountas and Pinnell (named after the two educators who developed the program). Outside of early education, these materials are best known from the groundbreaking 2022 podcast series Sold a Story, in which investigative journalist Emily Hanford found the curriculum, and others like it, to be ineffective at teaching literacy skills.

With AAPS’s shift, “we’re very confident that each year we’re going to see that incremental improvement where students have both built their reading stamina … because it is far more rigorous, and they [will have] acquired all those skills they need to be independent,” says Linden. But she adds that the M-STEP, like all standardized tests, has “limitations and inherent bias, so making sure that we keep those data points in the right context is important.”

Kristen Smith, elementary ELA and social studies curriculum coordinator for the district, explains that while the M-STEP and similar assessment programs offer “large data,” the district is also strengthening its local assessment system, including the Phonics, Reading, and Spelling Survey “to better understand each strand of literacy and which students might need some additional interventions.”

The district is building off its previous work: in 2022, it began offering educators state-funded elective training in a program called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS. Smith says it can “provide our teachers with all of the foundational knowledge that they need to understand how students learn to read and write.” Just over 50 percent of AAPS elementary educators are enrolled in the training or have completed it. In addition, Linden says, “our building literacy coaches are in every building, coaching and supporting teachers.”

“A Really Big Ask”

Stella Rodriguez, who teaches first and second grade at Ann Arbor Open School, believes kids “need to learn the ‘how’ of reading, but also need to fall in love with it.” As one of the teachers who piloted Arts & Letters for the district, Rodriguez hopes the new curriculum “will blend the two together.” She also calls a newer K–2 phonics program from UFLI Foundations, another science of reading tool, a “step in the right direction.”

However, with AAPS teachers working without a contract since the end of last year (“Why the AAPS Contract ‘Agreement’ Was Anything But,” May 2026), Rodriguez, who is a union rep for Open, is conflicted. “I don’t know that it’s the fix-all that Ann Arbor thinks it is,” she says. “The program is a lot of time and energy to do it well. If they continue to invest in curriculum and programs but don’t respect the time and labor of the teachers, it’s not enough.”

Rodriguez sees the elective LETRS training, which she completed in 2024, as “valuable” but also “a really big ask” in the current climate, because teachers aren’t compensated for the training time. (LETRS is an eight-month commitment that can take more than ninety hours.) Smith, the district ELA coordinator, says potential grant funding could provide substitutes so teachers can complete the training during the school day.

Closing the Gaps

In AAPS and statewide, educators and officials are concerned not only with improving proficiency rates, but also with narrowing racial, economic, and other disparities in the results. M-STEP data show that English learners, students with disabilities, and kids from economically disadvantaged families are among the subgroups of students with the greatest needs. In Ann Arbor, there was a nearly 46 percentage point gap between economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged third-graders who scored as advanced or proficient in English Language Arts last year.

“The data shows that kids with privilege and money, they’re doing okay, [but] you look at kids who are poor and who are Black or Brown and they are not,” says Kathy Wyatt, who leads the Literacy Coalition of Washtenaw County. She points to “the historical racism, the segregation, the lack of access to housing and good jobs, and then you add schools and underfunding of Black schools … It outrages me. A person’s life story should not be written when they’re in third or fourth grade.”

In the Ypsilanti area, Washtenaw Intermediate School District superintendent Naomi Norman estimates there are some 5,580 students scoring more than a year behind grade level who require support.

“Schools have a role, for sure” in improving outcomes, Norman says, but “our community has a role as well. How are we creating an overall culture of literacy, and support for literacy, coming from every direction?”

Next month’s theme: “Our Children Need Us:” Economically disadvantaged students are disproportionately reflected in lower test scores across the county. How are schools and the community stepping up to help the kids who are falling behind?