How well did Florida’s high school graduating class of 2023 do on the SAT?

Florida’s education policymakers love to talk about the success the state’s 4th graders have had on NAEP exams during the last few decades. But ultimately it doesn’t matter very much what kids can do in 4th grade. What matters a great deal more is what students can do when they graduate from high school. This realization has started dawning on former policymakers like former State Board of Education Members Sally Bradshaw, Gary Chartrand, T. Willard Fair, Bobby Martinez, John Padget and Kathleen Shanahan, who recently wrote a letter to the editor in the Tampa Bay Times about Florida’s ACT results. And Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell recently asked why nobody was paying attention to Florida’s results on the SAT.

When the Class of 2023 SAT results were released by the College Board back in October, I wrote about the state’s weak results on that exam’s math section. But prompted by Scott Maxwell’s interest, I looked at the ERW (English, reading and writing) results as well. It turns out that Florida’s students are doing reasonably well on the SAT ERW exam, in contrast to the poor results on the math section.

To review: Looking at SAT results makes more sense than looking at ACT results because 90% of the Florida high school graduating class of 2023 took the SAT while only 46% of these students took the ACT. And if we are going to compare Florida’s SAT scores with other states, we should limit our comparison to those states that have high SAT-taking rates like Florida does.

It turns out there are ten other states in which 90% or more of the 2023 high school graduating class took the SAT – Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. In addition, 100% of the high school graduating class in DC took the SAT. So we have a group of a dozen jurisdictions (including Florida and DC) in our comparison group.

First, we’ll look at math as I did in October. Both of the convenient metrics that the College Board provides show that Florida does poorly in math. Our state’s mean score on the SAT math section ranks tenth among these twelve jurisdictions. And for the percentage of students who achieved what the College Board calls the “college-ready” math score of 530, Florida is tied for eighth place.

But Florida’s ERW results are more promising. Among the twelve jurisdictions we’re examining, Florida is ranked third in both mean ERW score and in the percentage of students who achieve the “college-ready” score of 480.

The bottom line is that Florida is at least decent in ERW and weak in math.

So what does this tell us about the state of Florida’s public K-12 system?

Jeb Bush’s original A+ Plan was focused on building reading achievement. We were then – as we are now – the “Just Read!” state. That emphasis on reading (and corresponding deemphasis on math) is loud and clear in these most recent SAT results.

By the way, this lack of achievement in math is not a recent thing, and it would be a mistake to blame anyone in office now for this situation (at least not entirely, although of course the present leaders are not doing anything significant to fix it). I know a very prominent scientist who graduated from a Florida high school in the late 1960’s who told me that the lack of interest in math and science in Florida’s K-12 schools goes back at least to his time in them – even though the intense space race with the Soviets in the 1960’s had its epicenter at Cape Canaveral about 50 miles from his high school.

What would it take to fix Florida’s math woes? My perhaps too trite answer is that Florida needs many more individuals who are strong in math themselves to enter the teaching profession. This would probably require a complete transformation in the way that the state’s leaders think about the teaching profession. But that’s what it would take, and I live in hope that it can happen.