Last March, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation its proponents said would eliminate “high-stakes” testing in public schools.

The legislation replaced the Florida Standards Assessments with something called progress monitoring, a series of three tests administered to students throughout the school year to measure student progress in pretty much the same areas as the old FSAs — language arts and math as well as other core subjects.

The new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) tests provide reports to families as to how their child is doing as they work to meet, at minimum, grade level Florida Benchmark for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST) content standards (yeah, we know) as all Florida schools transitioned to the new program.

So instead of one “high-stakes test,” students take one at the beginning of the school year, one at the midpoint and one at the end with the last one being the most important.

The concept makes sense and School District of Lee County officials said last year that it actually has been using progress monitoring for years.

There’s good and bad in the first-year numbers just released by the Florida Department of Education.

The good?

Here in Lee County there was significant progress from the first monitoring assessment and the third in both language arts and math.

Overall and across the board, the needle moved as expected. As the FDOE explains, each testing period measures “the full year’s content expectations” and so scores get better as “students are exposed to the content and instruction is adjusted to meet student needs.”

In language arts the number of students on grade level or above in grades 3-10 shot from 30 percent in the first assessment to 37 percent in the second to 46 percent in the third or final test.

In math, the number of students on grade level or above in grades 3-8 went from 13 percent in the first monitoring period to 27 percent in the second to 54 percent in the final.

The bad?

Overall, 54 percent of students in grades 3-10 are not reading at grade level and 46 percent are not on grade level in math.

While the numbers vary by grade, we will look at two. In grade three, the year where students “stop learning to read and read to learn,” only 42 percent were reading on grade level at the end of the school year; 58 percent are not. Fifty-five percent are on-level for math; 45 percent are not.

Only 45 percent of 10th graders were reading at grade level; 55 percent were not.

The FDOE has said these numbers should not be compared with last year’s. The achievement levels for the 2022-23 school year are provisional and will be reported on a new scale after the State Board of Educations adopts new student achievement expectation in the fall, the FDOE’s results charts state.

Fair enough.

We will not make comparisons to years past.

We will, though, point out that Lee County students continue to lag behind their peers statewide where 50 percent of students in grades three to 10 were on grade level in reading at the end of the year with 56 percent at grade level in math in grades three to eight.

In Collier County to the south, the numbers were 54 percent at grade level in reading compared to Lee’s 46 percent; 69 percent in math compared to Lee’s 54 percent.

In Charlotte County and Sarasota County to the north, the numbers were 52 percent 59 percent respectively in reading; 58 percent and 66 percent respectively in math.

It is fair to say Hurricane Ian impacted student learning this year in Lee County with students displaced from their homes and even from their schools as they doubled up on campuses elsewhere.

But the gap in achievement among Southwest Florida’s coastal counties is consistent, no matter the monitoring method of choice, no matter the place in time.

Too many of our kids are struggling to attain not proficiency, but to just keep up, to feel successful so they can feel confident taking on the next educational challenge and the next.

Let us point out that while the new tests/progress monitoring reports may not be “high stake” one-shots, as with the old FSAs, students must pass certain tests to be promoted to the next grade, must pass certain tests to graduate, must know how to read and do rudimentary mathematics to be successful in whatever path they choose after high school.

That number for third graders not reading on level as they head into fourth grade, that 58 percent? Each point represents hundreds of children who hit their first key educational benchmark and were unable to jump the hurdle.

Despite monitoring. Despite progress.

And yes, despite the efforts of an education team led now by a superintendent whose efforts to improve not just the district’s internal processes but its educational emphasis on the classroom should be acknowledged.

The district has some inherent challenges:

Student absences and out-of-classroom time compounded first by COVID and then by Hurricane Ian.

Teacher absences and teacher shortages which can hamper the learning process.

A student demographic that represents the diverse community that is Lee County.

A student demographic that represents the economic reality of Lee County.

We agree with educators who say there are few easy solutions and we’ll go so far as to say the district’s vision “to be a World-Class School System” is and has been a pretty far stretch.

The district’s mission, though, is both possible and laudable: … “to ensure that each student achieves his/her highest personal potential.”

May that be, at the very least, on grade-level achievement for each child, each student, each step of the way.

— Breeze editorial