Patricia Levesque, Executive Director of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, has commented on the recent results from Florida’s statewide student assessments. The results indicate improvements across all grades and tested subjects over the past year.
“In every grade and tested subject, Florida students made improvements over the last year. We should celebrate this accomplishment statewide as a final mark of academic achievement for the 2024-2025 school year,” stated Levesque.
Levesque addressed concerns from some in Tallahassee who have advocated for reducing educational expectations. She emphasized that both students and schools have shown that “the Florida model works.”
She highlighted that more students are achieving a year’s worth of learning within a single academic year, which aligns with educational goals. However, she noted ongoing challenges: “Despite this progress, there are still far too many students not achieving on grade-level, and our students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) declined again this year in three of the four tested areas.”
Levesque concluded by encouraging continued efforts to improve student outcomes while celebrating recent progress: “As we look forward, let’s celebrate this great progress while also pushing ourselves to continue to improve outcomes for students.”
The assessment program in Florida involves three progress monitoring assessments annually. The first two are diagnostic and low stakes, while the final assessment is summative and high stakes with implications for school accountability. The Foundation compared results from the 2024 Progress Monitoring 3 assessment against those from 2025 to evaluate yearly student performance.
Year-to-year comparisons between PM3 assessments provide significant insights into student progress. In contrast, within-year comparisons offer less valuable information since they compare full-year instruction performance against initial weeks’ performance.
