Good news for students on critical FSA test
Third-graders improve on key reading exam
Central Florida’s thirdgraders scored better on the state’s key reading exam this year than last, mirroring an increase seen across Florida, the Florida Department of Education announced Friday.
The percentage of public school third-graders passing the Florida Standards Assessments language arts test hit 58 percent this year, up from 54 percent last year.
Students in Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole all passed at a higher rate in 2017 than their classmates did a year ago, state data showed.
The FSA language arts test is a key one for third-graders as Florida’s controversial retention law says those who score very poorly — earning a level 1 score on the five-level exam — could be held back and barred from fourth grade. Statewide, 19 percent of thirdgraders scored at level 1 this year, down from 22 percent in 2016.
Parents of the 228,104 thirdgraders statewide who took the FSA reading exam should learn soon how their children did.
Friday, some schools started notifying parents, sending notes home or having teachers call or email.
Across Florida, more than 43,300 third-graders now face retention, though typically about half the students with level 1 scores move to fourth-grade anyway. That’s because they either meet one of the retention law’s exemptions or demonstrate reading skills on another test or through a portfolio of class work.
The percentage of thirdgraders passing, or earning a 3 or better, was 68 percent in Seminole County, 63 percent in Lake County, 57 percent in Orange County and 53 percent in Osceola County in 2017. Lake had the biggest jump in scores, with a 6-percentage-point increase from 2016.
Educators said they were particularly pleased to see strong gains at schools where many students had struggled academically in prior years.
“We are extremely excited about their scores,” said Britt Despenza, principal of Eagle's Nest Elementary School in Orange. “Teachers were ecstatic.”
Eagle’s Nest earned a D on the state report card last year. But its third-graders this year scored 11 percentage points better than counterparts did in 2016, giving Despenza and her staff hope that fourth- and fifth-graders did better, too, and a higher grade would be handed out when the state releases the 2017 school report card this summer. School grades are based largely on student performance on state tests.
Despenza said thirdgrade scores likely improved because the school had its nine third-grade teachers plan lessons together, working through what students needed to master and how they’d teach them each benchmark. Reading coaches gave extra help to instructors who needed it.
And the 13 third-graders repeating the grade because they’d failed FSA last year
were in a small class together, getting intensive reading instruction. All 13 passed FSA this year, she said.
Seminole Superintendent Walt Griffin said he was pleased with the increases seen across his county and also on his district’s struggling campuses. At F-rated Pine Crest Elementary in Sanford, for example, the percentage of third-graders passing the exam jumped up 16 percentage points to 41 percent.
Seminole’s overall thirdgrade scores ranked it first out of Florida’s 17 largest school districts.
“We’re just really happy,” Griffin said. “I’m very proud of our teachers.”
The FSA replaced the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, debuting in 2015. The new series of math and language-arts exams aimed to test mastery of Florida’s new academic standards and were meant to be tougher than FCAT.
Initial scores on the FSA were lower than the last batch of FCAT scores. But the third-graders this year did better on FSA than third-graders did on FCAT reading in 2014, the last year that exam was given.
Griffin said educators have gained a better understanding of the new language arts and math standards, which are Florida’s version of Common Core, so they are now doing a better job helping students learn them.
In Osceola, Superintendent Debra Pace said she was
Educators said they were particularly pleased to see strong gains at schools where students had struggled academically in prior years.
happy to see the percentage of third-graders scoring a level 1 drop by 3 percentage points. That will help “minimize third-grade retention,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to analyze the data to see where we will target our efforts for further improvement.”
The third-grade language arts scores are the first wave of marks to be released from the series of standardized tests Florida students took starting in late February. They come out ahead of the others because schools are required to consider them before making four-grade promotion decisions.
Third-graders’ FSA math scores, FSA scores for children in grades 4 through high school, and scores from Florida’s standardized science and social studies exams will be released in coming weeks.