The biggest news in STEM education this year was the release of the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math results. Nationally, students lost a considerable amount of ground. But in Florida, there was celebration over the state’s continuing high ranking for 4th grade math.
Florida should curb its enthusiasm over the 4th grade math results. After all, in the end it doesn’t matter what a student can do in 4th grade. What matters is what a student can do when she or he graduates from high school – or maybe later than that. No student should peak in 4th grade.
NAEP also tests 8th graders, which is better than 4th grade but not ideal. So are there data for high school graduates? Yes – college entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT. In Florida, the vast majority of the high school graduating class of 2022 (81%) took the SAT (the percentage who took the ACT was much smaller). So how does Florida stack up on the SAT compared to other states in which at least 80% of the class of 2022 took the SAT?
There are ten such states, including Florida. We’ll look at DC, too, so we will compare Florida with ten other jurisdictions.
Florida looks great in 4th grade, with the highest percentage of students earning achievement levels of “proficient” or “advanced” among the eleven jurisdictions.
But by 8th grade, that advantage has pretty much evaporated.
The College Board says that a student is “college and career ready” in math if she or he earns 530 on the math section of the ACT. As for the 8th grade NAEP math exam, Florida ranks poorly on this metric among the eleven jurisdictions in which more than 80% of the high school graduating class of 2022 took the SAT.
So Florida peaks in 4th grade.
As you’d expect given this data about the math proficiency of Florida’s students, the state does not produce bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering at a high rate, according to the National Science Foundation’s science and engineering indicators.
Florida’s workforce reflects this lack of emphasis on STEM education. Despite being the home of Kennedy Space Center, Florida’s knowledge- and technology-intensive industries employ only a small percentage of the state’s total workforce. In fact, the percentages of engineers and physical scientists in the Florida’s workforce are among the smallest in the nation, according to the NSF science and engineering indicators.
As narrow as Florida’s STEM pipeline is, it is even narrower for the state’s Black students. Black students are underrepresented in the middle school Algebra 1 classrooms in Florida’s public schools. Students must take Algebra 1 in middle school to qualify for a calculus class in high school, which gives them a leg up if they choose a math-intensive STEM major in college. This underrepresentation intensifies as the student progresses through the STEM pipeline. (Data from the Florida Department of Education)
There was some good news at the high school level. After years of decline in physics enrollments in Florida’s public high schools, enrollment rose 5% from the fall of 2020 to the fall of 2021 because of large increases in Brevard and Hillsborough Counties.
Speaking of Brevard County, Seminole and Brevard Counties were ranked first and second in this year’s STEM Career Prep Index, which is calculated by adding the percentages of high school students taking chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus. Brevard had a down year in 2020-21, but returned to its usual #2 ranking by largely restoring its state-leading physics enrollment rate.
Nevertheless, Florida remains far behind national norms for enrollment rates in high school physics and calculus.
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