Summary:
Detroit Leadership Academy High School is the sole high school in the Detroit Leadership Academy district, serving grades 7 through 12 with 271 students in a highly impoverished area of Detroit (82% free/reduced lunch).
This single-school district faces severe, interconnected challenges that place it in the bottom 1% of Michigan high schools. Academic proficiency is critically low: only 6% of 11th graders pass the social studies M-Step (state: 43.2%), and 10th-grade ELA proficiency sits at just 6.3% versus the 58% state average. The graduation rate is 69.8%—14 points below the state norm—while the dropout rate of 16.8% is more than double Michigan's 7.1%. Perhaps most alarming, 69.2% of students are chronically absent, nearly 2.5 times the statewide rate of 27.9%. This attendance crisis likely drives many of the poor academic outcomes, as students cannot succeed if they are not in class.
Despite spending a relatively high $18,739 per student (well above Michigan's typical $12,000–$14,000 range), the school has shown no meaningful improvement over eight years, hovering between the 1st and 4th percentile in state rankings since 2017-2018. The one hopeful sign is 9th-grade ELA proficiency at 24%—nearly four times higher than the 10th-grade rate—which may indicate recent instructional changes are starting to take effect, though this has not yet lifted the school's overall standing. With no other schools in the district to benchmark against, all metrics reflect this single institution's performance. The concentration of poverty here is extreme, and while financial resources are above average, they have not overcome the deep-rooted barriers of chronic absenteeism and low academic momentum. Parents should understand that this school requires substantial, sustained intervention to change its trajectory, though the 9th-grade data offers a small glimmer of potential progress.
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