Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The latest report from the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) on the reading scores of third graders across the state shows a significant drop in the reading level of students at Jefferson County Somerset Elementary School (JCSES) in 2022.
The District Comparison Report on the Florida Standards Assessments (FSA), which the FDOE released on May 22, shows a nine-percent drop in the percentage of JCSES third graders reading at level 3 and above between 2021 and 2022, from 28 percent to 19 percent, respectively.
The nine-percent decline was the second highest in the state, surpassed only by Lafayette County, which had a 12-percent drop.
The FSA, per the FDEO, measure student achievement on a set of standards that specify the content that Florida students are expected to learn in the subject area of English Language Arts (ELA), among other subjects.
Developed by the FDOE with statewide input from educators, administrators, community leaders and members of the public, the standards are designed to ensure that students receive a learning foundation that is deemed necessary to succeed in each subsequent grade and/or course.
First administered in the spring of 2015, the FSA will cease to exist after this school year, as it is being replaced by Florida’s Assessment of Student Thinking.
F.A.S.T., as the latter is commonly called, is supposed to provide more frequent, actionable feedback to teachers, parents and students. It, in turn, will be aligned to the Benchmarks of Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) standards.
Adopted by the FDOE to measure student development, B.E.S.T represents a move away from the Common Core State Standards that previously applied across most of the country.
But back to the FSA results. Per the FDOE, the achievement levels possible on the English Language Arts assessments – referred to as performance levels – range from a Level 5 or Mastery, which indicates a student’s high likelihood of excelling in the next grade or course, to a Level 1 or Inadequate, which indicates a student’s high likelihood of needing substantial support for the next grade or course.
Between levels 1 and 5 are levels 2, 3 and 4, which translate into below satisfactory, satisfactory and proficient, respectively.
The FSA was not administered in 2020 because of the pandemic; hence there is a one-year gap in the statistics and no comparison possible for this particular year.
According to the FDOE figures, 53 percent of third graders across the state performed at Level 3 and above in 2022, compared with 54 percent in 2021, representing a one percentage-point drop. The 53 percent, however, is a drop of five percentage points from 2019, when 58 percent of third graders across the state achieved Level 3 or higher. It notably reflects a return to scores in 2015.
Meanwhile, 25 percent of third graders across the state performed at Level 1 in the English Language Arts
See READING SCORES page 3
in 2022, a two-percentage point increase from 2021, when the figure was 23 percent.
Others of the FSA results, according to the FDOE, African American third graders’ performance at Level 3 and above in 2022 remained unchanged from 2021 at 37 percent, while Hispanic and White students’ performance decreased by two percentage points each (51 to 49 percent and 67 to 65 percent, respectively).
The performance of Students with Disabilities at Level 3 and above in 2022 also remained unchanged from 2021 at 29 percent. Which, according to the FDOE, continued to be four percentage points higher than in 2015, when the test was first administered and this group of students’ performance was 25 percent.
The achievement gaps among racial and ethnic subgroups did not widen in 2022, according to the FDOE. Between 2021 and 2022, the achievement gap between African American students and White students narrowed by two percentage points, while the gap between Hispanic and White students remained constant.
The caveat is that although the gap between African American and White students narrowed, White student performance actually declined, while African American student performance remained consistent.
Hispanic student performance and White student performance declined equally across the state, according to the FDOE. And charter schools continued to outperform non-charter schools by seven percentage-points in 2022 (59 percent versus 52 percent), per the FDOE figures.
Additionally, according to the FDOE, charter school performance has been consistently higher than non-charter school performance since 2015, when the FSA was first administered.
Per Florida law, third graders who do not score at Level 2 or higher on the English Language Arts are typically not promoted to the next grade, although exceptions to the rule are allowed for good cause.
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