If so few students in Florida’s public high schools take physics, what do most students take instead?

Update (Monday, 2:40 pm): The SAT scores I quoted for Bright Futures eligibility were incorrect. I have updated this post with the proper scores.

Only 4.1% of the students enrolled in Florida’s public high schools this past fall were taking physics, so it is certain that fewer than one in five graduates from these high schools have taken a physics course. According to the 2019 National High School Physics Survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center, 42% of the national high school graduating class of 2019 had taken at least one physics course. So Florida students are far behind their peers from other states in learning physics in high school.

Florida requires that students in the public high schools take three science courses to graduate. One of those must be a biology course. But in addition to biology, what are students taking? The plot below provides an answer to that question by showing the top 25 science courses in the state’s public high schools ranked by enrollment in the Fall of 2023. The data come from the Florida Department of Education. The red bars show the physics courses that are in the top 25 – Honors Physics 1 and AP Physics 1. Non-Honors Physics did not make the top 25. Interestingly enough, neither did AP Chemistry.

Non-Honors and Honors Biology 1 top the rankings. That is not surprising given the statewide biology graduation requirement. The sum of the enrollments in those two courses is approximately equal to the 200,000 students who graduate from Florida’s public high schools each year. Then enrollments drop off pretty quickly. The Non-Honors Environmental Science course is next, and then Honors and non-Honors Chemistry 1. Enrollment in Honors Physics 1 is more than a factor of three lower than the enrollment in Honors Chemistry 1.

Florida is home to a number of high schools utilizing the dueling European college credit programs, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and the Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE) program, which is also known as the Cambridge program. No IB science courses make the top 25 (Pre-IB Biology 1 is ranked 25th, but no college credit-earning IB courses make the list). However, two AS-level AICE courses make the list – Marine Science and Environmental Management. Interestingly enough, of the six AICE AS-level science courses (Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Management, Marine Science and Physics), Marine Science and Environmental Management have the highest international exam failure rates (42.3% and 36.8%, respectively). At 31.0%, Computer Science isn’t far behind. But Biology (20.3%), Chemistry (12.8%) and Physics (13.9%) have much lower failure rates.

Financial incentives to students, teachers and schools drive students into AICE (and IB) science courses. A student who earns an AICE “diploma” by passing six AICE exams (in any subject mix) automatically earns a Bright Futures scholarship, which is Florida’s lottery-funded “merit” scholarship program. The same is true for an IB diploma. Students who do not earn an AICE or IB diploma must achieve qualifying scores on the SAT, ACT or Classic Learning Test (CLT). To earn a scholarship for 100% of tuition and fees, a student must achieve a score that is in the 89th percentile. For the SAT, that is presently 1340. A scholarship for 75% of tuition and fees requires a score in the 75th percentile, which for the SAT is presently 1210. AICE and IB diploma awardees do not have to sweat out standardized tests to earn their scholarships.

If a student passes an AICE exam (or an IB exam), both the student’s teacher and school earn bonuses. There is an extra bit of cash if the student happens to be at a high school earning a “D” or “F” school grade from the FLDOE. In addition, students can earn “acceleration credits” for their schools by passing AICE or IB exams.

The bonus system for both teachers and schools also applies to AP exams. However, the passing rates for most AP math and science exams are significantly lower than the passing rates for most AICE exams.

The bottom line is that a high school in need of resources (and that is all public high schools in Florida) has an incentive to steer students into AICE science courses in which the school’s administration believes that a large number of students will pass the exams.

I visited such a high school last week. It is a large school (more than 3,000 students) in one of the nation’s largest school districts. About two-thirds of the students are classified as economically disadvantaged by the Florida Department of Education (about half statewide are classified as economically disadvantaged). I was told during my visit that the usual science course progression for students in the AICE program is Honors Biology 1 in 9th grade, Honors Chemistry 1 in 10th grade, and AICE Environmental Management and Marine Science 1 courses in 11th and 12th grade (not necessarily in that order). The Fall 2023 enrollments in Honors Biology 1, Honors Chemistry 1, AICE Environmental Management and AICE Marine Science 1 were 287, 209, 163 and 140, respectively. That’s consistent with such a science course progression. The only physics course offered at the school this year is AP Physics 1, which had 18 students in the fall. In 2023, the national pass rate for the AP Physics 1 exam was 45.6%, well below the June 2023 pass rates for AICE Environmental Management (63.2%) and AICE Marine Science 1 (57.7%). In addition, AP Physics 1 requires a level of mathematical competence that is unfortunately less common among Florida students than it is in many other states.

At least there is a physics course offering at the school I visited, which means the school’s administration understands the importance of having that option for students. And the physics teacher there is quite well-qualified. The relatively few physics students are in a good situation.

But the students there who are not taking physics and aspire to attend medical school or pursue other health or STEM careers are putting themselves at a disadvantage. Untangling this problem would mean addressing a system of incentives that seems, for now at least, intractable.

What are the best college majors for salary and underemployment rate? The latest data from the New York Fed.

When it comes to choosing a college major and a career, economic security isn’t everything. But it must be considered.

Every February, the New York Fed releases labor market outcome data that zeroes in on the issue of economic security and college majors. Here are some of their results.

In this year’s data, ten of the top 25 college majors ranked by early-career median wage are engineering majors. In fact, of the top ten, eight are in engineering. Computer science is ranked highly (third), while mathematics and physics are also in the top 20.

The results are similar for mid-career median wage. There are ten engineering majors in the top 25 – in fact, they are all in the top 16. Computer science drops to sixth, while physics and mathematics are still in the top 20.

Nine engineering disciplines are among the twenty-five majors with the lowest underemployment rates. Computer science is sixth, while mathematics is also among the twenty-five lowest-underemployment rate majors. Physics is not in the top 25 for this metric. Instead, it is twenty-sixth, just off the list shown.

The definition of underemployment rate according to the New York Fed:

The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor’s degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.

Academic dishonesty, the future of artificial intelligence and physics learning – what I learned from an MIT physics professor

I assign homework problems on online courseware to the students in my calculus-based introductory physics classes to give them opportunities to learn. The homework is intended to enrich the learning they gain by doing collaborative lab and problem-solving exercises during our three-hour studio class periods that meet twice a week.

I’ve always figured that students who want to learn will take their homework problems seriously. Students who short-circuit these homework learning opportunities by lifting solutions from cheating services like Chegg are free to do so, of course. But I hope that more often than not they will be held accountable for their lack of physics understanding on my weekly in-class paper quizzes on which 60% of their grade depends.

I found the message that MIT Emeritus Physics Professor David Pritchard brought to my department during last Thursday’s colloquium talk on the evolution of academic dishonesty in turns comforting and challenging. It was comforting because Pritchard demonstrated that cheating on online homework assignments is strongly correlated with poor performance on the final exams in the physics courses he taught at his university. The challenge was his vision that artificial intelligence tools like GPT, which can be used for cheating, can also be used to improve learning.

Pritchard, who developed the online physics homework system Mastering Physics with his son, identified students in classes using Mastering Physics as homework cheaters if they answered their homework problems within one minute of opening each problem with 100% correctness rates. (Cheating on conceptual questions could not be identified this way)

In the classes that Pritchard studied for cheating, students who cheated on their Mastering Physics problems had a distribution of scores on a pre-test using a standardized assessment (Pritchard used the Mechanics Baseline Test) that was identical to that of those students who didn’t cheat. That is, weaker students were not more likely to cheat than stronger students. The bottom line is that, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, “cheaters gonna cheat”.

When Pritchard analyzed the dependence of final exam grades on several factors including midterm exam grades, online homework scores and pre-test scores, he found that the strongest predictor of a poor final exam score was cheating on the Mastering Physics homework problems. So “cheaters gonna cheat”, but eventually they pay the price for it through poor performance on exams.

For those of us who are Chegg-haters (haters gonna hate, right?), one of the most discouraging developments during the pandemic was the sudden jump in Chegg subscriptions. However, that pandemic-era increase has now been matched by a sharp decrease in Chegg subscriptions driven by the advent of ChatGPT. Cheaters are still gonna cheat, but now many of them are cheating with ChatGPT instead of Chegg. And cheating with ChatGPT is just as bad for student learning as cheating with Chegg.

But Pritchard has a vision for how the use of AI in the classroom can improve student learning instead of harming it. The night before a homework assignment is due, have students explain the difficulties they are having with to an AI. The AI can then summarize the student issues to the instructor, who reads the summary before going to teach his class and adjusts his instruction to deal with the student problems.

The overarching conclusion from all of this is that it is unlikely that AI will ever replace the human instructor completely. It is almost certain that human instructors will harness AI to improve their instruction. But until human relationships become unimportant in student learning – and that will never happen – the human instructor will play the leading role in the classroom.

MIT Emeritus Physics Professor David Pritchard addresses the FSU Physics Department during a colloquium talk on March 7, 2024.

How gender, race and economic disadvantage are reflected in AP math and science enrollment in Florida’s public high schools

From the Fall 2023 course enrollment data recently released by the Florida Department of Education:

Young women are significantly underrepresented among students taking AP Physics 1, which is by far the most heavily enrolled AP physics course. The representation of young women among students enrolled in AP Physics 1, AP Chemistry, AP Precalculus, AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC is compared in the plot below to the percentage of females among the population of Florida’s public K-12 schools. One additional and perhaps surprising fact – only 48.7% of the state’s students are female.

Black students remain severely underrepresented in all five AP courses we are examining here. That underrepresentation is most severe in AP Physics 1 and AP Calculus BC.

Hispanic students are also underrepresented in these courses, although not as severely as Black students.

Students who are classified by the Florida Department of Education as economically disadvantaged make up about half of the population of the state’s public schools. They are badly outnumbered by the more affluent half of the student population in AP Physics 1, AP Chemistry, AP Precalculus, AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC.

Some good news: Number of large Florida public high schools not teaching physics ticks down

The number of large (more than 1,000 students) public high schools in Florida not teaching physics declined a bit from Fall 2022 to Fall 2023, according to course enrollment data released recently by the Florida Department of Education.

This fall (2023), 63 large high schools – about one out of every six – did not teach physics. That compares to 68 such schools in the fall of 2022. The fall 2022 number was the largest since I began tracking that statistic for the fall of 2017.

The number of large public high schools not teaching physics rose rapidly from the 2017-18 school year to the 2020-2021 school year, which was the year most strongly impacted by the pandemic. The number has varied around 60 schools since then.

The large high schools not teaching physics in Fall 2023 are listed below the plot by school district.

Broward: Boyd H. Anderson High School, Dillard 6-12 School, Hallandale High School, McArthur High School

Citrus: Citrus High School

Clay: Middleburg High School, Orange Park High School

Collier: Immokalee High School, Lely High School

Columbia: Columbia High School

Miami-Dade: Felix Varela High School, G. Holmes Braddock High School, Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School, Miami Jackson Senior High School, Miami-Norland Senior High School, North Miami Beach Senior High School, Southwest Miami Senior High School, Westland Hialeah Senior High School

Duval: Edward H. White High School, Englewood High School, Jean Ribault High School, Terry Parker High School, Westside High School

Escambia: Escambia High School

Gadsden: Gadsden County High School

Hernando: Frank W. Springstead High School, Hernando High School, Nature Coast Technical High

Hillsborough: Spoto High School

Indian River: Sebastian River High School

Lake: Leesburg High School, South Lake High School, Tavares High School

Lee: Bonita Springs High School, Estero High School, Gateway High School, Island Coast High School, Lehigh Senior High School, Mariner High School

Manatee: Bayshore High School

Marion: Belleview High School

Osceola: Liberty High School

Palm Beach: Boynton Beach Community High, Dr. Joaquin Garcia High School, Lake Worth High School, Palm Beach Lakes High School, Somerset Academy Canyons High School, South Tech Academy

Pasco: Fivay High School, Hudson High School, James W. Mitchell High School, River Ridge High School

Pinellas: Clearwater High School

Polk: Auburndale Senior High School, Mulberry Senior High School, Tenoroc High School, Winter Haven Senior High School

Putnam: Palatka Jr-Sr High School

Sarasota: Booker High School

St. Lucie: Port St. Lucie High School, Treasure Coast High School

Volusia: Pine Ridge High School

Wakulla: Wakulla High School

Seminole County Public Schools is once again the #1 school district in Florida at preparing students for college STEM majors.

Seminole County Public Schools is the best in Florida at preparing high school students for college STEM majors, according to the STEM Career Prep Index for Fall 2023. Seminole County has been ranked number one every year that the index has been published.

The STEM Career Prep Index is the sum of the percentages of each district’s high school students taking chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus. The numbers are extracted from the Florida Department of Education’s Know Your Data Advanced Reports Portal, which is the nation’s leader in reporting course enrollment data.

Chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus are recommended by university faculty and professional organizations for high school students who aspire to careers in a wide range of STEM fields such as engineering, meteorology, computer science, biology, chemistry and architecture.

Seminole County Public Schools hasn’t been resting on its STEM Career Prep mountaintop. Instead, it continues to improve. During the last two years, the district’s physics enrollment has increased by 6.1%. During the same two years, the physics enrollment in all of Florida’s public high schools has declined by 10.1%. And Seminole County continues to push for more with its program to have its three Physics Buses visit elementary and middle schools in the district. That’s an effort that other Florida school districts should consider copying.

Are you a parent or guardian of one of the 26,156 Florida public high school students who took the new Advanced Placement Precalculus course this school year? If so, you owe Orlando Sentinel reporter Leslie Postal a big “Thank you!”

The shift in Florida’s public high schools from Honors Precalculus to the brand new Advanced Placement Precalculus is happening rapidly. In its first year, the AP Precalculus course has a larger enrollment (26,156 students) than Honors Precalculus (23,181). Both courses still far outpace dual enrollment precalculus classes (total enrollment of 1,773).

But AP Precalculus came perilously close to not being available to students in Florida’s public high schools this school year. I’ll pick up the story from here by quoting from a post on this blog from May 6 of last year that described how an article posted on the Orlando Sentinel web site by education reporter Leslie Postal triggered a reversal by the Florida Department of Education on offering AP Precalculus during the 2023-24 school year.

The AP Precalculus drama began when the State Board of Education (SBOE) approved a course code directory as a consent item at its meeting on April 19. AP Precalculus wasn’t included in the directory. Last week, Florida school districts started to lose hope that the course would be approved for the fall and began to adjust their precalculus plans for the fall – reinstalling Honors Precalculus and cancelling summer professional development plans for teachers.

But then Leslie Postal’s article on AP Precalculus was posted on the Orlando Sentinel website at 11:00 am on the morning of Wednesday, May 3. It reported that AP Precalculus was not yet approved for Florida’s public high schools and that this was causing school districts to change their plans for the fall. The article placed that situation in the context of the dispute that took place earlier this year between Governor DeSantis and the College Board about the new AP African-American Studies course. A few hours later, the Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, wrote to the College Board saying that Florida’s public high schools would be authorized to offer AP Precalculus in the fall. Shortly after that, AP Precalculus was added to the FLDOE course directory on the CPALMS web site.

Of course, the release of the Commissioner’s letter to the College Board caused Leslie to revise her story that afternoon. That revised story remains on the Sentinel website. (I am quoted in the story)

But why wasn’t AP Precalculus included in the course directory approved by the SBOE on April 19? Leslie reported in her revised story that the FLDOE said on Wednesday afternoon that “staff had been reviewing the course and decided to approve it”. That is, the review hadn’t been completed in time to include AP Precalculus in the course directory submitted to the SBOE for approval on April 19 but somehow managed to be completed on the day Leslie’s article was published.

Leslie also reported that the Commissioner’s letter to the College Board sent Wednesday afternoon included this: “We appreciate College Board submitting a course that is aligned with Florida’s state academic standards and that is age and developmentally appropriate.” While the language the Commissioner used in his letter might seem a bit strange at first, it’s worth recalling the artillery duel that took place earlier this year between Governor DeSantis and the College Board over the new AP African-American Studies course. That exchange now colors every interaction between the FLDOE and the College Board.

And the rest is history. AP Precalculus is now the most popular precalculus course in Florida’s public high schools. And it wouldn’t have happened without the Sentinel’s Leslie Postal.

Chemistry enrollments in Florida’s public high schools continue to drift downward

Enrollment in chemistry courses in Florida’s public high schools declined 1.0% this year (fall 2023 compared to fall 2022), giving a two-year drop of 2.7%, according to statistics released by the Florida Department of Education last week.

Of the students in Florida’s public high schools, 15.1% were taking a chemistry class in the fall of 2023. The national rate in 2017-18, which is the most recent available, was 19.5%.

Enrollments in Honors Chemistry 1 and AP Chemistry actually increased from fall 2022 to fall 2023. Honors Chemistry was up 1.7%, while AP Chemistry enrollment surged by 7.3%. The non-Honors Chemistry 1 course plunged by 5.8%. During the last two years (since fall 2021), enrollment in non-Honors Chemistry 1 dropped by 12.0%.

Only four Florida school districts – Brevard, Sumter, Seminole and Monroe – had chemistry enrollment rates above the national rate of 19.5%.

Physics enrollment in Florida’s public high schools declines 3.7% from Fall 2022 to Fall 2023, giving two-year drop of 10.1%

Physics enrollment in Florida’s public high schools declined this year as it has in all but one year since the 2014-15 school year, according to statistics released this week by the Florida Department of Education. This year’s decrease of 3.7% was not as precipitous as last year’s 6.6% drop, but it gave a two-year total decline of 10.1%. Since 2014-15 school year, the first year for which course enrollment statistics are available, physics enrollment has declined by 23%.

Seminole and Brevard Counties had the highest physics enrollment rates in Florida, with 13.2% and 12.8% of those districts’ high school students taking physics in fall 2023. Those two districts were the only ones in Florida that had physics enrollment rates above the national rate of 11.1%, which was measured in the 2017-18 school year.

Of Florida’s largest “megadistricts”, Hillsborough County had the highest physics enrollment rate at 5.8%, even though its physics enrollment declined 16.6% in the last year. Duval County had the second highest rate among the megadistricts at 5.5%.

Overall, 4.1% of Florida public high school students were enrolled in a physics course.
While physics enrollment declined in many of the state’s school districts, some districts bucked the trend. Physics enrollment rose in both of the state’s leading districts, Seminole and Brevard Counties. In Seminole, physics enrollment rose by 4.7%. The increase in Brevard County was 5.1%. Duval County increased by an even greater percentage, 10.8%.

In Lee County, which has almost as many high school students as Duval, physics enrollment declined by 26.0%.

The one school year since 2014-15 in which statewide physics enrollment rose was 2021-22. Physics enrollment was 5.4% higher in the fall of 2021 than it had been in the fall of 2020.

While statewide enrollment in both Honors Physics 1 and non-Honors Physics 1 declined this year, AP Physics 1 enrollment rose for the second year in a row.

Investigative reporter Craig Patrick from Tampa’s Fox 13 News showed how bad Florida’s SAT math situation is. What would it take to improve the math achievement of the state’s high school graduates?

After watching an investigative report on the math achievement level of Florida’s high school graduates assembled by Tampa Fox 13 News politics reporter Craig Patrick and his producer/cameraman Craig Davisson (and in which I played a role), a colleague pronounced the report – and Florida’s K-12 math and science situation – “bleak”.

The report focused on the decline in Florida’s SAT scores, particularly in math, and featured remarks (in addition to mine) from Jeb Bush, FEA President Andrew Spar and several tutors at a private SAT prep business. In addition to his usual comments about the importance of reading, Bush conceded that being able to “calculate math” has merit as well. In fact, he went so far as to say that reading and math skills are necessary to “live a life of purpose and meaning”.

[That last statement goes too far. Having strong language and math skills certainly makes it easier for an individual to attain a middle-class lifestyle, which may indeed make it easier to “live a life of purpose and meaning”. But it is demonstrably not impossible for an impoverished individual to live a purposeful life.]

The SAT tutors attributed the decline in SAT scores to Florida’s students not learning enough about statistics, the fact that many students take the SAT a year or more after their most recent experiences with algebra and geometry, and what one tutor said was the general tendency of Florida middle and high school math classes to run a year behind other states (I’d have to fact-check that one).

But one of the tutors interviewed hit on what is the most important point about Florida math and science education. He intends to become a middle or high school teacher, but he is planning to leave Florida for his first teaching job because “the State of Florida doesn’t really value its teachers in terms of pay”. In the report, the Fox 13 News team shared an analysis of teacher salaries by USAFacts that shows Florida having the lowest teacher salaries in the nation when adjusted for cost of living.

Spar argued that the result of the low pay and other obstacles for teachers in Florida is that there are thousands of teacher position vacancies in the state’s public schools so that “hundreds of thousands” of students don’t have highly qualified teachers leading their classrooms. The report on “High Demand Teacher Needs Areas” approved by the State Board of Education last month via their consent agenda (meaning the board members likely have no idea what is in the report) documents the situation that Spar discussed.

It would be convenient if the shortage of teachers, which is particularly severe in math and science (see figure below), could be “solved” through the use of technology, including artificial intelligence, instead of requiring the hard work of recruiting, preparing and retaining strong teachers. The reason the technology shortcut will not work is that students learn best through relationships with other students and with their teachers – that is, when they have strong connections to actual human beings in the learning process. That’s not just true in the early grades. It’s just as true in a college physics classroom like mine, where we connect students with each other and with instructors in a studio-style learning environment. And it’s certainly true in middle and high school math classrooms. Technology will continue to provide useful tools that teachers can use to enhance their students’ learning experiences. But any classroom in which teachers have been completely replaced with technology will only provide students with tasks that lack meaning and do not build understanding.

Building up the teacher corps that Florida’s public school students need will require the state’s educational leaders to abandon their preconceived notions about how schools and their staffs should be managed and paid. Teacher pay is certainly a big part of the problem. For all the talk about state-level investments in teacher salary increases, the bottom line is that the state is trying to solve a $5 billion per year problem with an investment of about $1 billion per year. The result is that while Florida’s statutory $47,500 minimum starting salary is fine and appropriate, experienced teachers are not making much more than that. This isn’t the way to build a strong profession.

While there are limits to what the SAT tells us about student learning, it does have its uses. One is to tell us that the achievement of Florida high school graduates in math is seriously deficient. This situation is limiting the career and economic horizons of the state’s young people. The only way to improve this situation is to make a major investment in attracting individuals who are strong in math to the teaching profession and to give them the tools they need to help every student fulfill her or his potential. Florida’s educational leaders should acknowledge that this is the only way forward, roll up their sleeves and get started.