The NAEP and Florida Chamber finally decided to read Billy's *free* content
Scam *private* schools are already killing Florida's test scores, if that's what you care about. And maybe trading all our youngs and workers for selfish old MAGAs isn't, you know, great policy.
It’s my world; grifters just grift in it.
Ya’ll don’t even have to pay me the big bucks (or any bucks) like Florida state government pays Politico Pro.
You read that here first, too, way before Elon’s cadre of misfit racist incel Stalinist purgers decided to read publicly available spending records and Tweet about it.
January 29, 2025
The eighth-grade math test scores were also worse than those of 27 other states. Florida’s score dropped even as the national score held steady. Florida’s eighth grade score reverted to below what it was in 2003, essentially wiping out progress of the last 20 years.
“Florida, they seem to look good in fourth grade in terms of how they rank with other states, but then when it gets to eighth grade you see them go from being one of the top handful of jurisdictions to a little below the median. That’s an interesting trend,” said Grady Wilburn, a senior statistician and researcher with NCES.
— Orlando Sentinel quoting a “senior researcher” with the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test. He’s “discovering” an “interesting trend.” LOL.
Sept. 14, 2019
Between 4th grade and 8th grade, an aggregated sample of the children of those states all caught and surpassed Florida's children on the NAEP Math test in 2017, the supposed national "gold standard" for comparative state testing. The NAEP is Florida education leaders' favorite test. And it says clearly that the measured "quality" of Florida's state model craters with age year after year after year. Florida's measured proficiency, in all subjects, always peaks for nine-year-olds and always collapses from there. Always.
December 2024, Florida Chamber of Commerce: “Florida Migration Trends” report
If we lose a large portion of the population from 20-29, while gaining a large population of retirement-age individuals who are not working, it contributes to a reduced labor force participation rate, which has been the trend in Florida.
Excluding the COVID-19 era, the current labor force participation rate in Florida for those 16+, 58.3%, is the lowest since 1983. This means that of the population aged 16 or older, less than 60% are either employed or actively looking for work. The current workforce is feeling the impact of the migration trends. We are seeing wealth migrate in – while portions of the workforce migrate out.
February 3, 2024
This is the most read article in the history of Public Enemy Number 1.
Florida’s economic and political “leaders” continue to trade young (and often native) Floridians employed in vital public sectors — teachers, nurses, police, etc. — for old people who are not employed, but who accumulated capital somewhere else they want to deplete here on an extended vacation.
*Private* school kids kill Florida test scores because Florida has made the median *private* school a terrible scam
This year’s NAEP scores showed the same thing Florida’s NAEP scores have always shown in the Jeb Bush era, since at least 2003: Florida’s state education system sucks, if test scores and personal growth are what you care about. Florida’s legislators and state leaders produce the worst yearly test score “learning rate” of any state in the country.
And make no mistake, Florida is a state-run, state-grifted, state-looted system. There is no such thing as a local district in Florida. (Except maybe Jefferson County, post scandal.) Even the best, most well-intentioned superintendent works for Ron DeSantis and his band of merry grifters, not the elected, ceremonial local School Board — or local voters, if elected.
Kudos to education writer Peter Greene, who reads me, for long ago internalizing Florida’s learning rate “interesting trend,” as the NAEP researcher put it. That’s a bit like calling the arrival of summer, or beach erosion, an “interesting trend.”
Florida has spent the last decade cranking up the voucher and charter volume, proudly came back fast from the pandemic shutdown of school buildings, boosted classical education, plugged the Science of Reading, and even tried to imitate Dolly Parton.
They have reaped the lowest reading and math scores in twenty years.
Now it's worth noting that, as Billy Townsend told people repeatedly, Florida's success with NAEP fourth grade test scores was a magic trick whose effect would completely vanish by eighth grade; Florida's students would perform worse as they moved up.
What’s the “magic trick?” Two parts:
Mass third grade retention that gives every “struggling” 4th grader taking the NAEP an extra miserable year of reading instruction, while killing their longer-term human outcomes… or
Outsourcing low-scoring “test refugees” to fake grifter private schools to duck 3rd grade retention and thus, the NAEP, altogether. Then, those “private school” kids quickly abandon their cheap state voucher and return to public education grifted in time to help Florida tank the 8th grade NAEP.
So, like Peter Greene, I chuckled at Florida Education Grift Commissioner Manny Diaz’s sudden “discovery” that NAEP testing is bad.
I especially chuckled at Manny’s pretend insistence that the NAEP test all the “test score refugees” planted in front of computers at segregated “Jeb Crow” private “schools” like “Endtimes Academy” so we get a truer picture.
In fact, Florida already tests most “private school” kids on the NAEP and state tests. How is that? Because of how quickly private school kids abandon their vouchers, another “interesting trend” I’ve cited, over and over again.
As I wrote in my “Jeb Crow” series on vouchers from 2021, the only study ever done on duration of voucher use showed:
The FTC voucher program has a 61 percent 2-year dropout rate. And a 75-percent 3-year dropout rate. What role do you think the Jeb Bush/Ron DeSantis Low Capital Jim Crow academies play in that?
Full, 5-part “Jeb Crow” series can be accessed here:
Now look: Manny isn’t the sharpest grifter in the sheath. But he knows what testing all “private schools” would do. He’s talking about adding all the rich kids who recently got free money vouchers to go to Lakeland Christian or All Saints or Bolles or Tampa Jesuit — the tiny handful of institutionally-solid private schools that would exist without vouchers.
Anyway, I have long said we should get rid of all these tests — in large part because very serious “senior researchers” seem oblivious to what they actually say. They do nothing but harm to any individual child. They are weapons of pernicious social sorting and grift. Nothing more. There is a world where mass testing might help children; but we have proven emphatically that we do not live in that world.
If you want to know more, NAEP and Chamber (or anybody else), my civic hobby is free to you
Now that a few writers/researchers other than me seem to being paying some attention to the Florida Great NAEP Regression and Florida’s 2nd Great Migration, which are not unrelated, here are some free articles I’ve written about both — if you want to get ahead of the civic curve. That’s where I work.
NAEP collapse content
You’ll find links to much more …
The horrors will never cease and you are right to lay this directly in the lap of Jeb. The 1998 constitutional revisions put Education and the BOE directly under the governor. This was back when a constitutional amendment only required a 50% vote. To repeal it now requires a 60% vote.