Florida’s SAT scores have dropped again.
We’re now ranked in a tie for 47th place as we race to the bottom. Look out, West Virginia, here we come.
Florida even trails states where more students take the test.
Most states have lost ground since COVID. But Florida’s SAT slide started before the pandemic even began. And while other states have slowed the slide, Florida is still plummeting — down another 18 points this year.
Nationally, the combined average for both math and the reading/writing parts of the test is 1024. In Florida, it’s 948.
We’re tied with Delaware. Only West Virginia, New Mexico and the District of Columbia fared worse.
You know, it’s almost like Florida’s plan for education — censoring books, berating teachers, whitewashing history lessons and sending families to fly-by-night voucher schools in strip malls — hasn’t worked out so well.
A few decades ago, leaders from both political parties made public education a priority. They may have had different ideas about how to achieve that goal. But everyone agreed it was important.
Today, Florida’s GOP politicians treat public education more like an annoyance than a mission.
Still, even they know 47th place is embarrassing. So they trot out excuses, blaming COVID and stressing that more students take the SATs in Florida.
Both of those things are true. But here are two things that are also true:
1) Even if you only look at states like Florida where more than 90% of students take the SAT, Florida is a cellar-dweller, tied for 7th place out of 10. Only one state, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia, posted lower scores this year. Even states where higher percentages of students take the SATs — like Illinois (96%) and Indiana (100%) — posted higher scores (966 and 969 respectively).
2) COVID hit every state. Yet Florida’s scores are still dropping more than most places. Nationally, average SAT scores dropped 4 points this year. In Florida, it was 18. Among high-participation jurisdictions, only D.C. fared worse.
The bottom line: Make all the excuses you want. There’s no legitimate way to spit-shine 47th place.
True leaders would step up and say: This is not good enough for our state. Our kids deserve better.
Instead, we get more teacher-bashing, culture-warring and book-censoring — none of which does anything to help students learn.
“This is a crisis moment for our students and our schools. We must act as a state to reverse the decline.”
Those are the words of Paul Cottle, a physics professor at Florida State University who has tracked the state’s math scores for years but is now just as alarmed by the state’s reading/writing scores, which have dropped to a 493 average.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his army of anti-”woke” education officials don’t like talking about the SAT. They prefer subjective rankings from magazines and interest groups that offer rosier assessments. Pay no attention to the actual test scores or teacher vacancies. Look at this good report card from the Center for Education Reform.
Listen, the SAT isn’t a perfect measure of intelligence or learning. No single test is. But it’s one of the best apples-to-apples metrics we have in this country — a widely accepted predictor of college performance.
And you know who knows that? Florida. That’s why this state asks most of its students to take the test. The politicians just don’t like the results.
I think it’s smart for Florida to get these annual metrics — especially since the state is now offering universal “choice,” taxpayer funded vouchers to schools that sometimes have very little experience in education.
In fact, one education expert told the Sentinel that Florida’s new vouchers-for-all program could be partially responsible for the state’s latest SAT drop.
That’s because these schools are so widely unregulated — some even hiring high school dropouts as teachers — that education policy professor Josh Cowen said, “It’s not at all clear what they’re learning.”
Some schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs, especially those that have been around for a while and know what they’re doing. But in too many cases, voucher schools tell parents that they’ve magically transformed their struggling students into honor-roll success stories — only for the families to get crude wakeup calls when their kids try to get into college and take real-world tests. Like the SAT.
That’s why universal metrics are important.
I know most Floridians care about public education — Republicans, Democrats and everyone else. Just last week, voters all over Florida supported local school referendums, including some that called for higher taxes to support that mission.
Cottle, the FSU professor, said, “The way to fix this is to recruit and retain more great teachers for our public schools.”
But Florida has fallen short on that front, first with vacancies and now with a high percentage of “underqualified” teachers, meaning teachers who lack the certification to teach in their subject area.
That is unsurprising as well. If you don’t pay teachers well — and then demonize them to boot — you’re not going to get the cream of the crop.
None of this is rocket science. If you care about good teachers and solid public education, you invest in both.
If you don’t, you keep waging culture wars, keep piling on teachers and then, when your scores predictably plummet, make excuses.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
