Florida has some serious problems with K-12 math education.
Of the members of Florida’s high school graduating class of 2021, 81% took the SAT. When Florida’s results on the SAT math test are compared with those of other jurisdictions (states plus DC) in which a high percentage of students in the class of 2021 took the SAT, Florida looks bad. There were four other jurisdictions – Delaware, the District of Columbia, Idaho and Illinois – in which more than 80% of the members of the high school graduating class of 2021 took the SAT. Of these five jurisdictions, Florida had the lowest mean score on the SAT math exam (480).
The College Board says a “college- and career-ready” score on the math SAT is 530. Only 33% of the members of the Florida class of 2021 who took the SAT achieved this college- and career-ready score, tying the state with Idaho for last place among the five jurisdictions.
You might have heard that Florida is a great state for K-12 math because our 4th graders are among the nation’s leaders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the Nation’s Report Card. It is certainly true that Florida’s 4th graders posted strong results on the 2019 NAEP math exam, with 48% of them earning an achievement level label of “proficient”, placing our state first among the five jurisdictions I am discussing here (Idaho was a distant second at 43%). However, by 8th grade (the next NAEP-tested grade level) Florida’s students had fallen back to third place among these five jurisdictions. Only 31% of Florida’s 8th graders earned “proficient”, while Idaho took the lead with 37% and Illinois was second with 34%.
And of course the SAT results show that by the time they graduate from high school, our state’s students are in last place among the five jurisdictions.
Being in first place in 4th grade is a little like leading a marathon at the five-mile mark – it doesn’t matter. What matters is where you stand at the end – in this case at high school graduation.
While K-12 math education in Florida is presently getting a lot of attention, none of that attention is going to help improve the math learning of Florida’s students. The attention is on the large number of math textbooks that were submitted for approval by publishers to the Florida Department of Education and then rejected for including “inappropriate topics” like critical race theory, social and emotional learning and even culturally relevant pedagogy. At the elementary school level, only one publisher made it through to approval. The mass rejection upended the plans that many of the state’s school districts had made to purchase books that then ended up on the not-approved list. So there will be a mad scramble to order new math textbooks for the fall, and it is likely that some (if not all) will not be delivered by the beginning of the new school year in August.
But textbooks play a minor role in the trouble facing K-12 math education in Florida. The bigger problem is the shortage of qualified math teachers. According to a report on Critical Teacher Shortage Areas prepared by Florida Department of Education staff for the State Board of Education earlier this year, there are likely to be more than 500 math teacher vacancies in the state during the present school year. During the most recent year for which data are available (which was 2019-20), only 98 math teachers completed the state’s approved teacher education programs. During the 2020-21 school year, 3,395 public school math courses at the middle and high school levels were taught by teachers not certified in math. From 2013 to 2018, the number of individuals passing the state’s Math 6-12 certification exam dropped by 45%. By 2020, that number had recovered a little so that the number of individuals passing the Math 6-12 exam was only 34% lower than it had been in 2013.
In Virginia, the GOP won the governor’s race in part by being The Party of Advanced Math and opposing the Virginia Math Pathways Initiative, which would have removed Algebra 1 from public middle schools altogether (about one-third of Florida public school students take Algebra 1 in middle school). A strategist from the successful Youngkin campaign told POLITICO that in Virginia “Advanced math is a big dang thing.”
I wish the GOP would be The Party of Advanced Math in Florida as well, focusing as much energy on improving math achievement in the state’s public schools as it is presently doing on math textbooks. The state has a lot of catching up to do in math, and figuring out how to recruit more great math teachers to Florida’s schools has to be the highest priority.
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