Why school choice? Just look at the latest reading evidence from education-choice-rich Florida

The fight over allowing Kentucky’s students to have choices over where they attend school has been loud and aggressive. Opponents of choice, including the governor and his supporters in the education bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions, have been pulling out all the stops to prevent Bluegrass State students from enjoying the same sorts of school choice options that students across the rest of the nation already enjoy.

Fortunately, others are wiser. With the passage of House Bill 2 last week, the Kentucky legislature now will allow the state’s residents to decide if it will be possible going forward for Kentucky to provide the same sorts of education choices that students in the vast majority of other states already enjoy.

Certainly, choice options elsewhere have led to some really notable improvements in education not only in the non-public schools but even in the traditional public school systems, as well. This is certainly true for the state of Florida, where the introductions of numerous choice options after 1999 have been accompanied by some notable progress in that state.

For example, in our Florida Versus Kentucky report we took a look at how Florida’s public school system had progressed compared to Kentucky’s from the early days of KERA up to the administration of the 2019 National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP).

It wasn’t even a contest. Even students in Florida’s public schools were walking (some might say running) away from Kentucky’s in both reading and math in both the 4th and 8th grades.

But this is 2022. COVID has wreaked havoc on school systems in this country. How does Florida stack up in the post-COVID-quarantine era?

This set of tables (generated using the NAEP Data Explorer web tool) will give you a quick idea of how the picture looks for reading.

The top tables compare white students’ NAEP Grade 4 Reading scores for the states from the year before Florida’s education reforms began in 1999 to the most recent 2022 results.

Because NAEP is a sampled assessment, all scores are actually just estimates of true performance. To allow for that, the tables also include information about which states do statistically significantly better or worse than others in addition to the ranking of scores. The scores shown are for public school students only.

Consider the white public school students’ results from the 1998 NAEP Reading assessment. Florida’s white students’ Scale Score of 217 falls in order as number 32 among the 39 states that participated and got NAEP results that year (State participation in NAEP didn’t become universal until 2003). In 1998, 21 states performed statistically significantly better and no state had a score that was statistically significantly worse than Florida’s whites produced.

Now, look at the upper right-hand table where Florida’s relative performance in the 2022 NAEP Grade 4 Reading Assessment is noted (All states participated and got white student scores from NAEP in 2022). Not one state in the nation had public school performance that was statistically significantly better than Florida scored for NAEP Grade 4 Reading. NOT ONE! Once the statistical sampling errors are considered, Florida is in a tie with Massachusetts and Colorado for first place.

In an even more remarkable turn of events, at the other side of the spectrum, Florida’s white students now statistically significantly outscore whites in 36 other states. That’s quite a jump from the number of states Florida’s white students outscored in 1998!

How did Kentucky’s white public school students fare? They were down in 27th position in the order in 1998, slightly above Florida. Kentucky’s white students slid back to 43st position for NAEP Grade 4 Reading in 2022. Kentucky was statistically significantly outscored by 13 states in 1998 and by 25 in 2022. Only two states scored statistically significantly lower than Kentucky did for white students’ NAEP Grade 4 Reading in 2022 – just two.

Now, look at the bottom half of the data display, which covers scores for Black public school students.

In 1998 Florida’s Black public school students placed almost at the bottom among the 34 states that participated and had enough Black students to support reasonably accurate scoring by NAEP. By 2022 the Sunshine State’s Black public school students also had improved dramatically, showing up in third best position in the order of each state’s Black student scores and in a statistical tie for first place once the sampling errors in NAEP are considered. No state scored statistically significantly higher for Black student scores.

In 1998, Black students in 5 other states statistically significantly outscored those in Florida for NAEP Grade 4 Reading, so even after allowing for the NAEP sampling errors, Florida’s Black students made definite gains against other states in reading.

How did Kentucky’s Black students do? Believe it or not, in 1998 Kentucky was way up in the order in 6th place. No other state’s Black students statistically significantly outscored Kentucky’s Black students. You can say Kentucky was in a statistical tie for first place for Black student performance, believe it or not.

Kentucky’s Black students sort of held their own in 2022, but Florida clearly has flip-flopped positions with the Bluegrass State as of 2022.

As far as changes in scores go, it’s not a contest. Between 1998 and 2022 Florida’s white students’ NAEP Grade 4 Reading score shot up from 217 to 234, a rise of 17 NAEP Scale Score points. Kentucky’s white NAEP Grade 4 Reading Score stayed unchanged at 220.

For Black students, Florida’s score change went from a dismal 186 in 1998 to a near-top number of 207 in 2022. Kentucky’s Black students didn’t see a statistically significant change with their score hardly budging from 199 to 200.

So, this is how things have been going since Florida started a major expansion of school choice in 1999 while Kentucky’s public schools, despite trying all sorts of fad ideas under KERA, has steadfastly ignored what might be the very best way to stimulate the traditional public school system to find out what really works and use that. That stimulation is – competition from school choice.

Soon, Kentucky voters, it will be up to you. Florida and other states aren’t going to wait for us; they’re not going to go backwards, either. School choice is unquestionably associated with remarkable reading improvement in Florida’s public schools, and Kentucky’s students deserve an equal chance to enjoy a better education, too.