The Flagler County school district, like other districts and the state, is touting the latest students achievements with the release of standardized testing results.
“Flagler Schools is proud to announce increases in every subject area, as well as achieving the same pass rate or higher than the state average in all areas except one,” the local district announced in a release.
The state Department of Education said that “for the first time ever, more than 60% of Florida students are performing on or above grade level in both English language arts and mathematics, marking another significant milestone for Florida’s nation-leading education system.”
The claim that Florida’s education system is “nation-leading” is dubious at best: the state ranked 40th among the 50 states in average SAT scores in 2025. Florida students ranked 48th on average ACT scores. The National Assessment of Educational Progress also showed Florida students in the bottom half of states in math and reading, with better scores in science and writing. The NAEP is known as the “Nation’s Report Card.”
The SAT, the ACT and the NAEP are apples-to-apples comparisons between states. The results released today by the Department of Education are not. They compare results only within Florida of a test designed only for Florida students. In other words, what is considered at grade level in Florida may not be necessarily so in Massachusetts or New York.
“If we truly want to have the world-class education systems we should have here in Florida, then we’ve got to look a little broader than just the state assessments,” Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar said in a WUSF interview last year. He was also critical of the state’s repeated change in testing methods and assessments over the past decade, with the latest switch occurring in 2022-23. “It’s hard to know how our students are doing over the course of time when we constantly switch the type of assessment we are using to assess students,” he said.
The results released today should be considered with that caveat in mind.
Between 2023 and 2026, the percentage of students scoring on or above grade level on the end-of-year English Language Arts progress monitoring assessment increased by 12 percentage points, from 49 to 61 percent, the state reported. The percentage of students scoring on or above grade level on the end-of-year mathematics assessment improved by 9 percentage points, from 53 to 62 percent.
In Flagler County, the district reported the following:
- ELA pass rates increased by 5 points to 63%, 2 points higher than the state average of 61%.
- Math pass rates increased overall by 3 points to 64%, 3 points higher than the state average of 61%.
- Grade 5 pass rates increased overall by 3 points to 61%, 1 point higher than the state average of 60%.
- Grade 8 Science pass rates increased by 6 points to 60%, 3 points higher than the state average of 57%.
- Biology EOC pass rates increased by 5 points to 76%, 2 points higher than the state average of 74%.
- Civics EOC pass rates increased by 3 points to 74%, only 2 points behind the state average of 76%.
- U.S. History EOC pass rates increased by 3 points to 73%, equal to the state average.
“These results are a testament to the hard work and dedication that students and staff have continued to show year after year,” Flagler Schools Superintendent LaShakia Moore was quoted as saying in the release. “A major contributing factor was our continuous improvement cycles which encompasses schoolwide improvement plans, streamlined assessment windows, instructional reviews, and data chats.”
School grades for the district and each individual school are expected in July. The district scored an A rating only once since 2012, in 2019. It has been a B-rated district the rest of the time.
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