A Policy Brief from EPIC

2020-21 Retention Outcomes Under Michigan’s Read by Grade Three Law

March 2023

In 2020-21, the first year of retention’s implementation, roughly 5% of third-grade students, or 3,440 students, who took the M-STEP were eligible for retention. Districts retained 5% (175) of those retention-eligible students, promoting the other 95% to fourth grade through good cause exemptions. While a relatively small proportion of students were retention-eligible and retained, the policy disproportionately affected Black and economically disadvantaged students.

Our study uses two different methods to analyze the implementation of the Read by Grade Three Law’s retention requirement. First, we predict which retention-eligible students are more likely to be retained under the Law based on factors like demographics, exemption qualifications, test scores, and district characteristics. Second, we compare the retention rates of students just above and below the retention-eligibility cut-off to see if there were any differences in how the Law was applied to different subgroups of students. The combination of these two methods, explained in detail in the accompanying working paper, helps identify how strictly the Law was implemented and if it disproportionately affected certain groups of students.