PODCAST:
Feb. 12, 2026 ~ Craig Mauger, state politics reporter with The Detroit News, joins Kevin Dietz to talk about his article: ‘Michigan falls short of reading goal despite $1 billion in spending.’
DETROIT, MICH. ~ In an effort to boost student’s literacy skills, the state of Michigan has spent about $1 billion, but these efforts have fallen short. The goal was for the money to help make Michigan a top 10 state for fourth grade reading proficiency, but the results haven’t been very successful, according to Craig Mauger of The Detroit News.
“We did some research going back to how she’s handled reading throughout her term and even before then,” Mauger said about Whitmer’s efforts to increase reading scores in Michigan. “And we found that in 2019, her first year in office, she described the situation with early reading in Michigan as a crisis. They’ve taken steps to invest hundreds of millions of dollars already to try to improve scores. And they just haven’t improved. Actually, they have gotten worse, according to the metrics that lawmakers said they should be judged on.”
