Less than a year after the Michigan State Board of Education selected Michael Rice to helm the Michigan Department of Education, the school year was cut short, courtesy of a worldwide pandemic.
He has led the state’s education agency as the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. A school shooting that sparked a fraught slew of threats. And the start of what some, including Rice, hope is a movement to meaningfully improve the way students learn to read.
Rice, retiring at the beginning of October, has witnessed a lot of upheaval while in the highest position in education in Michigan: the state superintendent of public instruction. And though he acknowledges public education has a long way to go to better serve the state’s 1.4 million students, he’s sure that some of the direction the state has taken during his tenure has led to meaningful progress, progress he’s tracking through an 8-goal strategic plan.
“We’ve made progress on all goals,” he said. “We’ve not arrived on any. They’re big, hairy, audacious goals.”
In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Rice shared where he believes students have made strides — and the work he believes the state needs to prioritize to fulfill those big, hairy, audacious goals.
The Michigan State Board of Education hired Dearborn Public Schools Superintendent Glenn Maleyko to take over in December. Rice said he would like to spend more time with his family, including his two daughters. He assumed the state superintendency in 2019, after leading Kalamazoo Public Schools.
Rice started his career as a high school French teacher in Washington, D.C. If you spend any time with him, you’ll see he still very much lives by his training as a teacher: He’s fastidious in making eye contact. He keeps track of the conversation, checking in to make sure he has answered a question thoroughly.
And then there’s a quintessential Rice vocal quirk, in the form of the phrase “And and and” — it’s common for him to punctuate a sentence that way, when he says he hits a point in speaking where “you don’t need to go on.” It’s a habit he said he picked up from others in his time in the education world.
Are Michigan’s schools on the right track?
Third grade reading scores are raised as the bellwether in the state’s reading crisis, because the ability to read by third grade can often portend a student’s success in school and after, research claims. And Michigan’s third grade reading scores have been stubborn, with the proportion of students scoring proficient or higher declining significantly from 2016 to 2025, from 46% of third graders at or above proficiency a decade ago to 39% on the test this spring.
But third grade reading isn’t the only metric, Rice said. Yes, many state test scores in English and math remain below pre-pandemic levels. But students improved in 14 of 20 of the tests they took this spring.
“It’s not my opinion, it’s numbers,” he said.
And later, he adds: “The business of education is complex. To distill it to any one metric makes little sense. If I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got the highest graduation rate in history, we’re doing better than we’ve ever done in history,’ you’d say, ‘Dude, really? Is it all about the graduation rate?’ It’s not all about the graduation rate, but it’s in part about the graduation rate.”
So while Rice isn’t ignoring the third grade reading crisis — and has recommendations to better address it — the superintendent also pointed out where metrics are improving, including a higher graduation rate, an increase in students enrolled in Career and Technical Education Programs and increases in scores for other grades and subjects on the M-STEP.
The younger students who took the third grade M-STEP test this year were approaching the age they usually enroll in kindergarten or other early childhood programs when the pandemic shut down schools and took education online in many parts of Michigan. Rice said those closures have had a monumental impact for younger students.
“Even if your district was remote six or seven months of the year, that’s a profound amount of time, a huge amount of time for a 6- or 7-year-old,” he said.
Rice said he was also a part of the effort advocating for the state Legislature to pass a package of literacy bills signed into law in 2024 after several years of lawmakers introducing the reform effort. Those laws and the emphasis on using more evidence-based strategies could advance early literacy in Michigan, like they have in states hailed for literacy improvement, including Mississippi, he said.
The pandemic also took a toll on students’ mental health. So did two school shootings within two years: The Oxford High School shooting in November 2021 and the MSU shooting in February 2023. But for Rice the concern for students’ mental health has been long-running as he worked in local education for 35 years.
“Attending funerals, making hospital visits, being eye-level with children, connecting with them, speaking with them one-on-one in classes … Oxford was a tragedy,” he said. “It most assuredly affected our thinking about public education in the state, and so, too, MSU. … Oxford, for many, was the awakening or the consciousness raising … but we knew as educators long before that, that we needed to be doing better.”
Rice said during his time as superintendent, the state’s public schools have added 1,700 school social workers, guidance counselors, nurses and psychologists.
‘It’s an outrage’
There’s another cause Rice brings up a lot lately, one he claims will be key in improving early literacy in Michigan: the amount of time students spend in school.
While state law requires students to be in school for 180 days, law changes approved by the state Legislature makes it possible for students to attend school as few as 149, according to the Michigan Department of Education, with days built in for educator professional development, weather disruptions and up to 15 days of virtual school.
“The Legislature has permitted our children to be in school fewer days than pre-pandemic,” he said. “It’s an outrage. … Why would you do that coming out of a pandemic?”
And Rice has also spent some of his final months in office advocating for the state to make teacher training around the science of reading mandatory. Rice is a former local administrator and stressed that he supports local control in “hundreds of ways” — early literacy has become an exception.
“Local control has produced the results that we have to date,” he said. “And we need to improve upon those results.”
In the nearly hourlong interview with the Detroit Free Press, Rice used the phrase “and and and” five times.
Because there’s a lot still on the state’s education to-do list in his estimation: improving student mental health, training more educators in the science of reading, stemming the teacher shortage and more.
Or, in Rice’s words: “And, and, and …”
Contact Lily Altavena: laltavena@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Amount of days Michigan kids must be in school is ‘an outrage,’ education chief says
Reporting by Lily Altavena, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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