Florida’s public school kids take a lot of standardized assessments. The state and our local school districts see them as valuable diagnostic tools to see how students are doing. Other states do the same thing, but comparing states to states is tricky. Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project tries to do it, and their research shows Florida’s elementary school kids seem to lose a lot of ground as they move into middle school.
Using state assessment results, the Stanford study showed from third to eighth grade, Florida’s students learned 12% less each year from 2009 to 2018, dead last in the nation.
“Is Florida really worse than Alabama? I don’t know, we should study that, though, because that’s what that data says, if there’s a reason why that data is invalid, we should note that reason, same with the NAEP, but one of the things I pointed out is this pattern has been in place for 20 plus years at least,” said Billy Townsend, a former Polk County School Board member who highlighted this issue in an editorial this week for the Tampa Bay Times.
Townsend points out that on the NAEP test — known as the nation’s report card and given every two years in Miami-Dade, Duval, and Hillsborough counties to fourth and eighth graders — Florida’s fourth graders score consistently well, but there’s a huge drop off for the eighth graders. Last year, the state’s fourth graders ranked fourth in the nation in math, but the 8th graders were 31st.
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“You cannot pawn this off on the pandemic," Townsend said. "Florida has a pandemic-level collapse between fourth and eighth grade every year on the NAEP, every year."
There are many possible reasons for the disconnect between fourth and eighth grade scores, including the fact that in Miami-Dade, 58% of eighth graders took high school-level algebra or geometry. The NAEP tests them on math they had a year or two earlier, making it harder.
Miami-Dade and Broward Public Schools have each embarked on initiatives to redesign and reimagine middle schools in recent years. Townsend says that should be a priority statewide.
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“Whether you’re woke, unwoke, liberal, con, whatever, your kids are gonna regress in this system," he said. "We should be creating a system where you can be the best version of who you are and develop."
Miami-Dade’s chief academic officer, Lourdes Diaz, told NBC 6 on Thursday the district is adding more magnet STEM programs and constantly adding resources to schools, such as tutoring opportunities before and after school.
Diaz also pointed out that the federal Department of Education rated Florida’s assessments harder than many other states, which could skew the data downward and be one of the factors accounting for that dead last ranking in the Stanford study.
