Florida shines in national student test scores

Florida was the only state where students scored higher on a national math exam last year, solving problems better than counterparts did two years earlier and making progress where the rest of the country remained in place, according to new results released this morning. .

The Sunshine State in 2017 reversed some of the declines it witnessed in middle-school math in 2015 and posted its highest ever fourth-grade math score, the results showed. Florida also was one of nine states that showed gains on the reading exam given as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, orNAEP.

“Something very good is happening in Florida, obviously,” said Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of assessment at the National Center for Education Statistics, during a telephone call with reporters ahead of the release. “Florida needs to be commended.”

Carr said she could not explain Florida’s gains but called them interesting and notable. Researchers spliced the data — by race, family income, gender and whether youngsters had disabilities— and found Florida students showed growth on the 2017 NAEP, where most other states did not.

Dubbed the “nation’s report card,” NAEP exams are meant to be a “common yardstick” to measure student academic performance across the country. Every two years, they are given to a sampling of students in each state.

Nationally, average scores for fourth and eighth graders on math didn’t change from 2015, nor did scores for fourth graders in reading. The average eighthgrade math score, however, went up from two years earlier. NAEP was first given in the early 1990s, and nationwide scores were higher in 2017 than they were back then, despite