Five Things Florida Learned From the Nation’s Report Card

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Five things we learned from Tuesday's National Assessment of Educational Progress results.

Yesterday we wrote about the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, the gold-standard for apples-to-apples comparison of state education.

Math and reading scores for fourth and eighth-graders were released yesterday.

Here’s five things the nation’s report card tells us about Florida. You can check the results for yourself here.

1. Progress has stalled — Florida’s scores are essentially unchanged for the past six years. This follows more than a decade of gains as Florida improved from below average in every tested category.
2. Florida is average —  Florida student scores in most categories were not statistically different from the national average scores. There is one exception…
3. Better young readers — Florida’s fourth graders scored better on the reading portion of the test than the national average. This has been the case since former Gov. Jeb Bush emphasized reading when he took office in 1999.
4. Narrowing achievement gap — The difference in scores between Florida’s black and Hispanic students and their white classmates is less than the national average. This “achievement gap” is also closing more quickly in Florida than it has nationally over the past decade.
5. Get tough — With state gains stalled, Bush and others argue its time to raise standards and ask more of students.