The top reported proficiency rate is 21% in English language arts. The lowest is 10% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Lincoln Elementary School
Lincoln Elementary School sits on Federal Avenue in Warren, the largest city in Macomb County and Detroit's biggest inner-ring suburb. It is a traditional public school serving kindergarten through fifth grade as part of Van Dyke Public Schools, one of several districts that carve up Warren's large, decentralized footprint. The city itself is an auto-oriented place built on a six-by-six-mile grid of wide arterial roads and mid-century subdivisions, with no traditional downtown and limited walkability. Its economy runs on automotive and defense employers, with General Motors, the U.S. Army Detroit Arsenal, and Stellantis anchoring the local job base. Warren is a mature suburb that grew explosively in the postwar decades and has been gradually losing population since. For a family considering this school, that context matters: the surrounding neighborhood is working-class, established, and closely tied to the industrial corridor that defines metro Detroit's eastern suburbs.
The school's enrollment is moderate for an elementary building, with students spread fairly evenly across the six grade levels. Nearly every student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, one of the highest such rates you will see in any school. The student body is predominantly Black, with smaller groups of white students and children of two or more races, and a handful of Asian and Hispanic students. This is a school serving a community with deep economic need.
On Michigan's M-STEP assessments, Lincoln's proficiency rates are low across every tested subject and grade. In math, only a small fraction of third, fourth, and fifth graders reached proficiency, with fifth-grade math the weakest. English language arts results were somewhat stronger, particularly in fourth grade, where roughly a quarter of tested students were proficient, and fifth grade was close behind. Science in fifth grade was low, and social studies was lower still, with no students reaching the proficient threshold in the state's reporting range. When compared with the county's districts, Lincoln's overall proficiency sits in the bottom quartile. These are sobering numbers. A parent may want to ask the school directly how it is responding, what intervention and support structures are in place, and what growth looks like for individual students beyond the single-year proficiency snapshot. The data we received does not include multi-year trend lines, so we cannot say whether these results are improving, holding steady, or declining.
Several categories of information that would help a parent round out the picture were not available. The school does not report individualized education program counts or English learner figures, so we cannot characterize special-population services from the data on hand. There is no chronic absenteeism rate, no discipline data, no staffing or class-size information, and no course or program offerings listed. Because Lincoln is an elementary school, it has no graduation rate; that metric simply does not apply here. The Van Dyke Public Schools district brief did not surface any parent-relevant changes in the recent span, so there is little to report on strategic initiatives or shifts.
Housing in the school's zip code is inexpensive relative to both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values sit well below the Michigan median and far below the national median, and rents are similarly modest. The county-level market shows a healthy supply of active listings with moderate demand, and homes are spending a bit longer on the market than a year ago. For families looking to buy or rent near the school, affordability is a real advantage here, though the housing stock is aging and the area is not seeing major new development.
What Lincoln Elementary offers is a small, community-rooted elementary serving a predominantly Black, high-poverty student population in a working-class Warren neighborhood. The academic results as measured by the state are low, and a family considering this school should treat that as a prompt for direct conversation with the administration rather than a verdict in itself. The missing data on staffing, programs, attendance, and special populations means the picture here is incomplete, and a visit or a call to the school would go a long way toward filling it in.
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