So much "Winning". Where is Florida in education? Well basically in last place. DeSantis and the GOP wants the young generation to be as stupid as possible -- even behind D.C. in SAT scores. ‘Cry more!’ Florida SAT scores sink again while education leaders act like online trolls https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2023/12/05/florida-sat-scores-drop-manny-diaz-trolls-maxwell/ New rankings show Florida students are posting some of the lowest SAT scores in America. We’re talking 46th place. Down another 17 points overall to 966, according to the combined reading and math scores shared by the College Board. Florida trails other Southern states like South Carolina and Georgia. We trail states where more students take the test, like Illinois and Indiana. We somehow now even slightly trail Washington, D.C. — a district long maligned as one of the supposedly worst in America, where all students take the test. This should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Yet what are Florida education officials obsessing over? Pronouns. And censoring books. While other states focus on algebra and reading comprehension, Florida’s top education officials are waging wars with teachers about what kind of pronouns they can use and defending policies that have led to books by Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston being removed from library shelves. We are reaping what they sow. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Florida’s current crop of top education officials isn’t just the misguided policies they’re pushing, it’s the way they behave. Like it’s all a joke. Like Twitter trolls. They’re calling names, mocking those trying to have serious conversations about education and generally reveling in owning the libs. A few months ago, Orlando Sentinel education reporter Leslie Postal spent weeks trying to get public records about a newly hired state education employee. Postal just wanted to explain to taxpayers how their money was being spent. But state officials refused to answer questions. So Postal wrote up the piece, and Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz shared the piece on Twitter (now X) with a two-word comment: “Cry more!” For those of you who don’t speak troll, “Cry more” is a response used by some social-media users — usually those juvenile in age or intellect — to mock someone who is unhappy. The folks at Urban Dictionary, who revel in all things trolly, define “Cry More” as a “phrase used in online games when someone is getting owned, and they b*tch about it.” The game in question here, mind you, was the Sentinel’s two-month quest to get answers about how the state was spending tax dollars. And the response from the state’s top education official was: “Cry more!” What a role model for students. That’s just one example. Last week, after I wrote a column about rampant book-censorship in the state — with one district shelving 300 titles — State Board of Education Member Ryan Petty responded (at quarter ’til 1 in the morning): “Just dumb. This passes as journalism.” Followed by a clown emoji. OK, for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m the dumbest clod to ever set foot in the Sunshine State. Petty still wouldn’t answer any of the direct questions posed in both the column and on Twitter. Specifically, if the goal isn’t widespread book-banning, why won’t his education department provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn’t have access to in school? Petty opted for emojis over answers, because that’s what trolls do. The responses on Twitter to Diaz and Petty — both appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — were about what you’d expect. One user told Petty: “My ninth grader could have crafted a more articulate response.” Several users responded similarly to Diaz’s “Cry More!” post, questioning his ability to maturely discuss policy and referring back to a Miami Herald investigation into student claims of “inappropriate behavior” by Diaz back when he was a teacher; claims Diaz said were bogus smears. None of this did a thing to address this state’s education issues. Yet that’s where we are in Florida these days, mired in culture wars and trolling each other. We also saw something similar last week when Diaz refused to directly answer questions from Orange County Public Schools about whether teachers were allowed to honor the requests of transgender students who wanted to be addressed with different pronouns — if the teachers wanted to and if those students also had their parents’ written permission. (Think about how bizarre it is that schools must even ask that question … in the so-called “parental rights” state.) In his response to the district, Diaz offered a theatrical and condescending response that referred to “false” pronouns but which school officials concluded didn’t actually answer the question in a straightforward manner. Just more troll games … involving a population of teens more prone to self-harm and suicide, no less. As far as the SAT goes, the test certainly has its share of legitimate critics. But it’s still one of the best apples-to-apples metrics we have for student learning. Yet hardly any Florida media organizations even covered the October release of the new SAT scores that showed Florida’s poor showing. Why? Because we’ve been trained to follow the bouncing-ball, culture-war debate of the day. So we see plenty of coverage about Florida supposedly ranking No. 1 in “educational freedom” by partisan political groups and scant addition to real education issues. Call me old-fashioned, but I like hard numbers more than political posturing or magazine rankings. So do others who actually care about and study education. Paul Cottle, a physics professor who authors a blog that focuses on STEM education, noted Florida’s increasingly cruddy SAT scores back in October when they were released — when everyone else was focused on the debate-of-the-day. Cottle noted that Florida’s math scores for 4th graders were solid but that the SAT scores for graduating seniors were so bad, they suggested something was going awry for students before Florida schools sent them into the real world. Cottle called the showing “a sad state of affairs.” He’s right. Yet we’re getting precisely the educational environment and results that our culture-warring politicians are cultivating — an environment where trolls thrive, even if students don’t.
I have said it at least two dozen times. GWB has absolutely no critical thinking skills. Dude can't reason his way out of a paper bag. Couldn't find truth with two hands and a flashlight. How about we review this artice's conclusions? Claim by the partisan Sentinel and GWB_NPC - "Florida has one of the worst SAT scores in America". Just go to the link of the data provided in the article and you'll see that the ranking lists every state (of course) and the % of students taking the SAT in that state that are being used in the ranking. Arkansas is one of the best. So, to, is Alabama and Louisana (which the article is using as a comparison). Does anyone believe Alabama would rank better than Massachusetts? Of course not. So why did they get better scores? Because only 3% of Alabama's students took the test and they're obviously the best of the scoring while 53% of Mass's students took it. Kentucky with 2% taking the test scored 1208 while New Jersey with 64% scored 1066. Is Kentucky's education system better than New Jersey's? In fact, only 12 states logged more than 90% of their students taking the test for this study, and FL ranks 8 out of 12. GWB, as always, you're a fucking tool of the first order, and the only reason I don't beat on you more is because I don't spend a whole lot of time here anymore.
'Bobblehead' is not doing too well in the debates also. Body language expert analyzes GOP debaters: 'Insincerity and chronic deception' Ron DeSantis is one of the best examples of a face that betrays insincerity and chronic deception, a body language expert said on Wednesday night. Body language expert Dr. Jack Brown, thought DeSantis' face stood out most. "The overly-frequent elevated forehead contraction is THEE most common body language sign of insincerity and chronic deception. There are few better examples of this behavior than Ron DeSantis," he wrote. Next, he drew attention to what appears to be a large frown on DeSantis' face. "A feigned pout is a reliable body language signal of insincerity and manipulative personality," the expert wrote Wednesday. "This is highly significant when displayed frequently – but also even in isolation depending on the context." "Immediately after Nikki Haley scores a point against DeSantis and Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis adopts a modified fig-leaf (genital guarding) configuration – signaling his emotional discomfort and and emotional vulnerability in that moment." Brown added that it appears as though DeSantis doesn't want to be on stage. "Someone has advised Ron DeSantis to stand away from his lectern. This bad advice," he wrote. "It projects a lack of full engagement and cognitive-emotional dissonance. Ron wants to be president – but he sure doesn't want to be on this stage. Also, high heels."
This is about what you expect of the governor of a state where the SAT scores rank below the very sad Washington D.C. school system (where all the students take the test). Rather than spending his time picking on Disney and LGBTQ+ people --- maybe DeSantis can actually work to solve the leading issues in Florida like the property insurance crisis (but this is not very likely). Ron does not give a damn about the residents of Florida.
Hey, NPC, you're SAT claim was bogus. As I pointed out. But then again, just about everything you post on this site is 100% horseshit. And to think, you're supposedly an "analyst".
Not only confined to SAT scores; Florida is at the bottom of ACT scores as well. Under DeSantis the scores are sinking to new record lows. How badly do you have to suck to rank lower than D.C. in test scores. ACT scores drop to new 30-year low, SAT scores drop as well https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/...op-to-new-30-year-low-sat-scores-drop-as-well TAMPA, Fla. — College admission test scores are dropping lower than previously, especially ACT scores, according to the nonprofit that administers the test. ACT scores dropped from 19.8 for the class of 2022 to 19.5 for the class of 2023. According to Collegeboard.org, SAT scores dropped from 1050 in 2022 to 1028 in 2023. When it comes to the ACT, this is the lowest score in 30 years, and Florida is one of the states with the lowest overall scores. (More at above url)
DeSantis' Florida fails in every K-12 educational assessment and it gets worse as the students increase in age. No other state comes close to Florida's complete education collapse. Florida’s education system is vastly underperforming A close look at ‘the Nation’s Report Card’ shows how Florida fails its students as they move up through the grades. https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/20...tion-system-is-vastly-underperforming-column/ A few years ago, just before COVID hit, a Stanford University study of state-level standardized tests showed that Florida’s “learning rate” was the worst in the country — by a wide margin. Florida students learned 12 percent less each year from third to eighth grade than the national average from 2009 to 2018. The next worst state was Alabama, according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Florida’s political and education leaders completely ignored that finding. Contrast that deafening silence with the hype and misinterpretation that comes with the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the Nation’s Report Card.” When those results came out last fall, Gov. Ron DeSantis crowed on Twitter that, “We kept schools open in 2020, and today’s NAEP results once again prove that we made the right decision. In Florida, adjusted for demographics, fourth grade students are #1 in both reading and math.” Tellingly, DeSantis ignored the eighth grade results, which came out far worse than fourth grade — just as they have in every NAEP cycle since 2003. The “Nation’s Report Card” is a snapshot of group proficiency taken by different cohorts of kids every two years in reading and math in fourth grade and eighth grade. It produces state-by-state results and proficiency rankings. It does not track individual kids year over year. But it does tell you how Florida’s fourth and eighth graders compare with students in other states. I crunched the data, and here’s the bottom line: Florida’s students perform worse as they move up through the grades. There is consistent, massive systemic regression with age. And the gap is widening. This is a state failure, not a local one attributable to individual districts. Yet, in every NAEP cycle, Florida politicians and education leaders brag about fourth-grade NAEP results in press releases. But ignoring the eighth grade results or the “learning rate” study does not change these facts: · Florida kids regress dramatically as they age in the system. Since 2003, Florida’s eighth grade rank as a state has never come close to its fourth grade rank on any NAEP test in any subject. · The size of Florida’s regression is dramatic and growing, especially in math. Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading). · No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse. In the last three NAEP cycles — 2017, 2019 and COVID-delayed 2022 — Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade. · For comparison, Massachusetts typically ranks at or near #1 among states on both the fourth grade and eighth grade NAEP for math and reading. Its eighth grade rank has never been more than one spot lower than fourth. · Florida has never matched the U.S. average scaled score on eighth grade math NAEP. · In COVID-marred 2022, Florida’s eighth grade scale scores in reading and math both lost 8 points relative to the national average, compared to fourth grade. That’s larger or equal to the overall collapse of NAEP scores nationwide attributed to COVID. To restate, what happens every NAEP cycle between fourth and eighth grade in Florida matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID. Overall, recent NAEP cycles show Florida collapsing from elite test scores in fourth grade reading and math to abysmal in eighth grade math and average in eighth grade reading, even after its much-hyped approach to COVID in 2022. And, worse, there is no reason at all to believe Florida’s test performance regression with age stops at eighth grade. The only two years the NAEP tested 12th graders — 2009 and 2013 — the Florida collapse worsened significantly with further age, but against a smaller pool of states. Willful ignorance, useless testing So what to make of this? You can rest assured that your top education officials know all about Florida’s eighth grade NAEP and learning rate failures, which is why they never discuss them. I suspect these test data realities helped drive Florida to drop its big state growth test — the Florida Standards Assessment — and move toward a “progress monitoring” regime this year that may or may not create functionally different data reporting models. The discourse around Florida’s NAEP performance — and the catastrophic learning rate that we ignore on our state tests — makes me deeply skeptical of standardized tests and their use in our education systems and society. I see them as punitive political and social sorting tools, rather than “assessments” designed to help individual children reach their potential. Forget whether test results are valid or biased. We can’t even accurately describe what the test results say — on their face — about the success of our state school system. So what use are they? Florida’s politicians, education leaders, policy community and journalists should look at these results and ask this basic question: The data tells us your child will regress dramatically every year he or she stays in the Florida system. What’s going on? If we can’t do that, then why do we force standardized tests on kids at all? What we should be studying I’ve been attempting to draw attention to this dramatic Florida regression dynamic for years. So I was pleased to the see the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board and Hillsborough County Schools Superintendent Addison Davis notice and publicly address the massive drop in test performance between fourth and eighth grade in Florida on the 2022 NAEP. But I was puzzled by suggestions that it was something new, caused by COVID. It isn’t; and it wasn’t. Indeed, if we took standardized tests seriously as diagnostic and development tools, we would have long ago started asking: What causes this? What changes need to be made beyond rebuilding and supporting a developmentally focused teacher corps? What are the system quirks of Florida that cause this dynamic? Here are some good questions to ask and study: · Why doesn’t “learn to read, read to learn” work in Florida? One of our treasured education cliches is “learn to read” so you can “read to learn.” It’s essentially the policy justification for imposing mass retention on third graders, as Florida does. And yet, although Florida routinely ranks high fourth grade NAEP reading, our readers immediately lose massive ground relative to other states. The data shows that Florida’s often punitive emphasis on “learn to read” by third or fourth grade creates no benefit in “reading to learn” in later grades — in math or reading. Why not? · What is the role of mass third grade retention in Florida’s fourth grade peak and subsequent collapse? Florida pioneered mass third grade retention based on reading standardized test scores in 2003. This prevents the lowest scoring third grade readers from taking the NAEP with their age cohort in fourth grade. And when that low scoring third grader finally takes the fourth grade NAEP, retention has made it as if he or she is a fifth grader taking the fourth grade NAEP. Florida law theoretically subjects more than 40 percent of Florida’s roughly 200,000 public school third graders to retention because of low scores. A smaller — but still significant — number is actually retained. Florida does not appear to publish that actual total number of third graders retained. · What is the cost to the individual children and overall system performance? Is that affecting Florida’s learning rate for older kids and the eighth grade NAEP collapse? A 2017 study of a cohort of southwest Florida students showed that seven years after retention, 94% of the retained group remained below reading proficiency. It also showed that third and sixth graders find retention as stressful as losing a parent. · How many voucher third grade testing refugees are there? What effect do they have on the fourth grade NAEP? Third grade retention is not Florida’s only way to get low scoring fourth graders off the books for the NAEP. It’s been well-established that Florida over-testing and third grade retention is a primary sales tool for vouchers. The Orlando Sentinel’s Pulitzer-worthy “Schools without Rules” report in 2017 about voucher schools reported: “Escaping high-stakes testing is such a scholarship selling point that one private school administrator refers to students as ‘testing refugees’.” How many testing refugees are there? And how does Florida’s massive voucher program — America’s largest and least studied — affect performance on the NAEP by allowing low scoring kids to duck it? · What effect do voucher school dropouts have on scoring when they return in massive numbers to public schools? At the same time, 61 percent of voucher kids abandon the voucher within two years (75 percent within three years), according to the Urban Institute, in the closest thing to a study ever done on Florida vouchers. Enormous numbers of “low-scoring” kids duck third and fourth grade tests and then come back into the public system to be counted in the eighth grade NAEP and other yearly tests. That’s likely a recipe for score collapse. But there is no hard data to analyze. Florida is long overdue for such a study, and voucher advocates know it will be a data bloodbath. Perhaps that’s because independent studies of smaller state voucher programs — with much greater oversight — shows attending a voucher school will “meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores,” according to Michigan State researcher and former voucher advocate-turned-critic Josh Cowen. · Does chasing test scores kill test scores over time? Test-driven instruction isn’t engaging. Kids come to understand how useless these tests are to their lives; and they behave accordingly. Teachers come to hate the test-obsessed model and leave the profession. How has that affected test scores? A longstanding waste of human potential For me, the eighth grade NAEP and “learning rate” failures are evidence that we’ve wasted a generation of human potential and severely damaged Florida’s teaching profession. Will anyone “follow the data” where it leads? Will anyone ask: Should our kids peak at age 9 and decline inexorably from there? I believe Florida has long had one of America’s worst test-performing state school systems because of its governance model and intellectual corruption and pursuit of useless measures and fake accountability. If you disagree, you should have the courage to look the data in the face and come up with your own explanation for what it tells you.