So much depends on high school principals.
According to state law, the primary goal of high school is to graduate students with baseline levels of competency in math and English language arts. Each high school principal has to decide for her or himself whether that is enough, or whether the mission of the school is to give every student the opportunity to fulfill her or his potential – and then nudge every student toward doing so.
A principal who decides to focus on realizing the potential in every student is doing something really hard – pushing students to do things that the principal almost certainly cannot do herself or himself.
And what about facing a parent who says something like, “Can’t my daughter (or son) just take that statistics course instead of calculus, or that marine science course instead of physics? She (or he) really wants to go to FSU, and she (or he) can’t afford to get a B.” Does the principal feel comfortable responding, “You know, your daughter really needs to take those calculus and physics courses her senior year if she wants to be a strong medical school candidate (or engineer?) in college.”
Does the principal empower her teachers? Does she make sure new teachers are introduced to the profession gently so they stay?
And what about principals at high needs schools where so many of the students’ dreams are endangered by the grinding pressures of poverty? Can a principal help her or his students peer above the limits of the circumstances?
Here we take a look at how Florida’s principals – and their teachers – are doing by looking at the rates at which their students enroll in calculus and physics courses. We limit our look to public high schools with 1,000 or more students. We use enrollment spreadsheets for Fall 2019 posted by the Florida Department of Education.
The FLDOE spreadsheets include dual enrollment courses. However, to protect privacy the enrollments of courses with fewer than 10 students in a school are starred out (“*”), so we cannot take those enrollments into account here.
We break Florida’s 361 public high schools with 1,000 or more students into five categories, each corresponding to a range of eligibility rates for free and reduced price lunches – which is an imperfect measure of socioeconomics, but the most readily available. The category for schools with free and reduced-price lunch rates (FRL) of 80.0% and above includes 52 schools; the category with FRL in the range 60.0-79.9% contains 109 schools; the category with FRL range 40.0-59.9% includes 104 schools; the FRL 20.0-39.9% category includes 73 schools; and the 0.0-19.9% category includes 22 schools.
The top ten schools in each FRL category are shown below. Miami-Dade dominates the 80.0-100% FRL category with four schools in the top ten and and four in the 60.0-79.9% FRL category. Brevard and Seminole Counties – Florida’s STEM superpowers – dominate the 40.0-59.9% FRL category with four schools each in the top ten. Brevard also has two in the top ten in the 20.0-39.9% FRL category and two in the 0.0-19.9% FRL category. Seminole has one in the 20.0-39.9% FRL top ten and one in the 0.0-19.9% FRL top ten. In fact, Seminole has only two 1,000-student high schools that are not in a top ten – Lake Mary, which is 11th in the 20.0-39.9% FRL category and Lake Howell, which is 22nd in the 40.0-59.9% FRL category.
For reference, the national rates at which high school students enroll in calculus and physics courses are 4.7 and 10.7 students per 100 high school students, respectively (for 2015-16 from the National Center for Education Statistics). For this post, I’ve adopted the same “number of enrollments per 100 high school students” parameter as the NCES has. Overall, Florida public high school students enroll in calculus at a rate about one-third lower than the national rate and in physics at less than half the national rate.
A spreadsheet that includes all schools can be downloaded here:
Bridge to Tomorrow 