Test scores are up in Broward County Public Schools.
The district is celebrating a 5% rise in a key state assessment, a splash of positive news at a time when they’re facing fiscal issues and dropping enrollment.
Across the board, for all grade levels, scores rose on the FAST exam.
“Teachers, great work, great job, we know what you’re capable of, and we believe in the things that you do every day for our students,” said the superintendent, Dr. Howard Hepburn.
FAST, an acronym for the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking, is given three times a year to measure student proficiency in math, reading and writing. The midyear results show Broward’s kids have been on an upward trend for the past three years.
“If you’re a K-12 district, your job is to educate students, so this metric is our number one metric, it’s our north star, and in Broward County, the north star metric that we’re watching is, in fact, going up in big numbers, all across the board,” said school board member Dr. Allen Zeman.
“We use this as a progress monitoring tool, and it indicates where we should end up at the end of the year if we don’t do anything else, but we always use this opportunity to diagnose certain issues with students, seeing what we need to personalize more, so we can actually exceed where we are now,” Hepburn said.
“And what it means is over the past three years, 25,000 students that were below grade average are now at or above grade level,” Zeman added.
I asked the superintendent what it signifies that these results can be achieved while the district is facing budget challenges.
“We know how to stay focused and prioritize the work that matters and that’s providing a high-quality education to our students,” Hepburn replied.
Fueled by declining enrollment over the past several years, the district is facing budget cuts, so the rising test scores can be a recruiting tool to attract more students.
“We just did a big survey, over a thousand people in Broward County, and found out parents prefer traditional public education by a three-to-one margin over charter schools, so we already have preferences for people to go to our schools, we just need to keep doing the right things,” Zeman said.
District officials are hoping that when students take the third part of the FAST exam at the end of the school year, the scores will be up even higher than they are now. Broward’s results beat the state average for urban school districts.
Midyear FAST results for Miami-Dade County Public Schools were not available to include in this report.