Does school choice hurt traditional public schools? Comparing NAEP results from Florida and Kentucky says the answer is No

Several days ago, the Bluegrass Institute released my new report about “Florida Versus Kentucky: School Choice Improves Public School Performance, Too,” which takes a look at how public schools in Florida progressed faster than Kentucky’s public schools. The findings are notable because Florida has enacted a very large number of school choice options for low-to-middle-income parents while Kentucky continues to offer its parents virtually no school choice at all.

Yesterday, I blogged about how Florida accomplished this remarkable improvement in its public schools while actually increasing the efficiency of its education dollars. Today, let’s look at one of the examples in the report that shows how dramatic Florida’s public schools’ improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) actually has been.

The figure below is shown as Figure 2 in the full report and was created with the NAEP Data Explorer web tool. This figure shows Florida’s public schools’ overall performance for all students compared to other states on NAEP Grade 4 Math in 1992 and in 2019.

Consider the top half of this figure.

The information strip shows that in 1992 Florida’s public schools got an overall average NAEP Grade 4 Math Scale Score for all students of 214. Public school systems in 24 other states scored statistically significantly higher than Florida while public school systems in 12 states were essentially tied with Florida’s performance and public schools in only five jurisdictions (four states plus the District of Columbia School System) performed statistically significantly lower. Nine states either didn’t participate at all in the 1992 Grade 4 NAEP Math Assessment or had data problems that prevented posting their scores.

States on the US map are color-coded to show which states scored higher (in dark blue), the same as (in medium blue) and lower (in light blue) than Florida did. The nine non-participants are shaded in white. As the focal state for the statistical analysis, Florida is shown in green.

As you can see, there are a lot of states shown in dark blue in the 1992 map, indicating those states outperformed Florida.

The color-coding also indicates that Kentucky was statistically tied with Florida for NAEP Grade 4 Math in 1992.

Now, look at the bottom half of the figure, which covers the public school performance on NAEP Grade 4 Math for 2019, which is the latest year of data available.

All of the dark blue shading is gone! That is because no state outperformed Florida for NAEP Grade 4 Math in 2019. NOT ONE!

Also, note that in 2019 Kentucky is now shown in light blue shading because it is one of the 38 states plus the District of Columbia where the public school systems scored statistically significantly lower than Florida’s.

Along the way, Florida’s NAEP Grade 4 Math Scale Score for public schools skyrocketed from 214 to 246.

To put the Scale Score results in terms you might better appreciate, the NAEP Data Explorer indicates that in 1992 only 13% of Florida’s students tested Proficient or Above on Grade 4 Math. By 2019, Florida’s proficiency rate shot up to 48%.

It’s amazing progress.

And, it happened in a state that instituted a whole lot of school choice options after 1992.

Florida didn’t just move ahead in its overall average performance for NAEP Grade 4 Math, either. The Sunshine State moved ahead impressively for its Black students’ performance, too, as this next figure, which is Figure 8 in the report, shows.

 Back in 1992, Black students in Florida didn’t outscore Black students in even one other jurisdiction on the NAEP Grade 4 Math Assessment. By 2019, Florida’s Black students were outscoring their counterparts in 29 other jurisdictions and no other state had statistically higher scores for its Blacks, either.

And, this isn’t unique. You can find a lot more examples from other NAEP assessments in the full report.

Bottom line for today: it certainly doesn’t look like the availability of lots of school choice hurt Florida’s public school system. Far from it. It looks like choice created competitive forces that spurred Florida’s public schools to improve much faster than what happened in choice-poor Kentucky. This is so even after KERA led to much faster growth in education spending in the Bluegrass State than Florida experienced, a topic also covered in the report and touched on in my first blog.

We’ll look at that funding issue more in a later blog, so stay tuned.