With the encouragement of its president, the Florida Senate is considering three bills that would “deregulate” public schools by removing many of the rules that have been imposed on these schools by the state since Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan was instituted in 1999.
Here I’m going to argue that this package of bills includes one provision, the deletion of the requirement that students pass standardized exams in English and algebra, that might prompt a shift in how schools prioritize the learning opportunities they offer their students. In turn, that might allow schools to pay more attention to how they prepare students bound for four-year colleges – and that change might even include doing a better job preparing students for bachelor’s degree-level STEM majors.
I recommend that the reader take a deep breath before burrowing into my argument.
One of the deregulation bills, SB 7004, would remove the present requirement that students in the public high schools pass the state’s 10th grade English Language Arts exam and the state’s Algebra 1 end-of-course exam, or earn “concordant” scores on the SAT, ACT, PSAT or Classic Learning Exam (CLT), to graduate from high school. (The definitive discussion of this change can be found on pages 8-10 of the most recent Senate staff analysis of the bill.) That would return the high school graduation requirements to what they were at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when the deletion of the exam requirements caused an increase in the graduation rate from 86.9% in 2018-2019 to 90.0% in 2019-20 and 90.1% in 2020-21 (see the figure below from the Florida Department of Education). The graduation rate retreated back to 87.3% in 2021-22 when the exam requirements were reinstated. To prevent the gentle reader from concluding that this change was not a big deal, I’ll invert the numbers. The percentage of students that failed to graduate on time in 2018-2019 was (100-86.9)%, or 13.1%. In 2019-20 and 2020-21 that number dropped to 10.0% and 9.9%, respectively. In 2021-22, when the exam requirements were reinstated, that number rose back up to 12.7%. That is, there were about a quarter fewer students who did not graduate on time under the no-exam requirement of the two pandemic school years than during the year before the pandemic and the year after the pandemic. That is a big deal.
High school principals are evaluated to a large extent on their schools’ graduation rates, so they focus on what it takes to boost the number of students graduating. If there is an exam requirement for graduation, they focus on making sure that as many students as possible pass the required examinations. In turn, that means that the efforts of the school’s faculty are focused on developing the minimum test-taking skills needed to pass the exams (which are different from actual skills in communicating and doing mathematics) in as many students as possible, particularly those who are at risk of not passing the exams. And that can make less instructional effort available to help higher-achieving students at those schools develop the skills they need to be (for example) successful in four-year colleges, including in STEM majors at those colleges.
If the test-taking skills needed to pass the English and algebra exams had value to struggling students after they left high school, then perhaps the instructional investment needed to instill these skills would be worthwhile. But these particular test-taking skills have no value to these students after they graduate, and so investing public school resources in developing those skills makes no sense.
The focus of instructional effort on developing the minimum test-taking skill level necessary to meet graduation exam requirements is almost certainly one of the factors contributing to the remarkably high number of large public high schools in Florida that don’t even teach physics, which is important for most college STEM majors. Nearly one out of every five large (more than 1,000 students) Florida public high schools didn’t teach physics during the 2022-23 school year. And while most of those schools had larger-than-average percentages of economically disadvantaged students, some of them did not. These schools just didn’t make teaching physics a priority. And these decisions made by administrators at those high schools have placed the graduates of those schools at a disadvantage if they have chosen economically attractive college majors like engineering.
Even if the examination requirements for high school graduation are removed, principals at some (or many) of the high schools that have neglected upper-level science and math courses like physics and calculus will not suddenly become more interested in providing these opportunities. But perhaps a few of these principals will do so. And for the aspiring engineers and scientists at their schools, this will be very good news.
Bridge to Tomorrow 