Florida’s public schools are required by law to teach a core content (“standards”) determined by the Florida Department of Education. “Standards must be rigorous and relevant and provide for the logical, sequential progression of core curricular content that incrementally increases a student’s core content knowledge and skills over time.” (Florida Statutes §1003.41)
The standards include distinct grade-level expectations for each subject area, and students’ achievement at each grade level is tested in accordance with a state schedule. Each student’s performance on the statewide tests indicates his or her progress in reaching benchmarks for those subjects.
For example, Grade 5 English Language Arts Standard 5.RI.1.2 is “Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize the text.”
Grade 8 Math Standard 8.EE.1.2 is “Use square root and cube root symbols to represent solutions to equations of the form x² = p and x³ = p, where p is a positive rational number. Evaluate square roots of small perfect squares and cube roots of small perfect cubes. Know that √2 is irrational.”
Browse all Florida standards by grade level and by subject here.
2022 School Board Elections
Some Collier County School Board candidates have criticized the District’s student performance on the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics tests.
Relevant CCPS Demographics
Most students, including English language learners (ELL) and exceptional student education (ESE) students enrolled in the tested grade levels or courses are required to the Florida Statewide Assessments (FSA).
As noted in a previous post, English is not the first language for nearly 16% of CCPS’s 48,000 students. Collectively, they speak 104 different heritage languages and come from 76 different countries of origin. More than 7,500 are in the District’s English Language Learners (ELL) program. Sixteen percent of students are eligible for Exceptional Student Education (ESE). The majority (65%) of the District’s children live in homes that are Economically Needy. Five percent are migrant.
CCPS Performance
CCPS has shown continual improvement in student test results, and in 2022 for the second consecutive year, outperformed the state in all 21 assessed areas.
Significantly, the District’s high school graduation rate of 92.6 percent has increased 20.1 percentage points since 2011 and 0.4 percentage points compared to 2020.
For more, see “Scores on Statewide Tests” in my post The Collier County School Board Elections: Setting the Stage and Understanding Florida Statewide Assessment Reports 2022.