Orlando Sentinel: Crist's education gains claim requires some creative math

Orlando Sentinel: Crist's education gains claim requires some creative math

TALLAHASSEE – All year, Gov. Charlie Crist has touted that on his watch the state’s education system had gone from a ranking of 31st in the country to 10th this year.

Florida's one-term governor and leading U.S. Senate candidate made the claim over the weekend in a speech to Republicans in Michigan and again Tuesday morning as he made the rounds on cable news talk shows.

"We're very pleased with what's happened there -- from 31st to 10th in the nation since I've been governor, and I'm very happy for our children for that," Crist said this morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show.

But the figures don't quite add up, according to the authors of the Education Week “Quality Counts” study the statement is based on.

The respected publication reported last January that Florida stood out compared to the national average scores in early childhood education and its assessment and accountability measures, produced more average scores for the caliber of its teachers and Kindergarten-through-12th Grade performance, and below average in school spending and college readiness.

Basically, the report gives Florida high marks for having accountability measures in place, but it is among the bottom of the heap in funding schools and gets an ‘F’ for college readiness. Overall, out of the six categories the study uses in its analysis, Florida and Arkansas finished with the same numeric score, 79.6 percent, indeed tying for 10th place.

But here’s where the confusion starts.

Education Week changed the way it conducted the study last year, shifting from collecting data in each of the categories every year to a “modular” research design where states are surveyed about half of the categories on an every-other-year rotation.

So, is it accurate to compare year to year? “Not really,” said Amy Hightower, the research director for the Editorial Projects in Education research center that produced the study. “We really do encourage states and the media that grading from one year to the next is not really comparable.”

That’s just for starters. Hightower said she wasn’t sure where Crist is getting the 31st ranking.

Until 2006, the research center only gave individual section grades, not overall ones, and that year Florida ranked 16th in the country. In 2008, Florida ranked 14th.

In 2007, the center didn’t issue overall grades, but did issue rankings for its newly minted “Chance for Success” and “K-12 achievement” indexes (two of the six categories now used to rank states). On both of those, Florida ranked 31st. Since then, Florida has fallen to 33rd in the rankings on “chance for success,” while the “K-12 achievement” ranking has climbed to 7th (not 10th).

Assuming that is the improvement Crist is mentioning, he still can’t claim credit for it – the 2009 report re-uses the same national data from the 2008 report, which was collected in 2007, when Crist first came into office.

The research center is careful not to draw correlations between performance and any particular policy changes within a state, but “if policy matters, then really the policy we’re talking about would predate the results,” Hightower said.

The time period that Education Week evaluated corresponds with years in which lawmakers devoted more cash to comply with constitutional mandates such as Florida’s class-size reduction requirement, increased incentives to retain and recruit teachers, and an explosion in real property wealth within the state.

And of course, Florida’s most significant policy reform has been Gov. Jeb Bush’s “A+” plan that mandated standardized tests for schools and tied school-funding to performance on the FCAT test.

“I think all of us are still parking on Jeb Bush’s dime as it comes to education reform,” said Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and former school superintendent who helped Bush trumpet the classroom reforms.

Crist did serve a short stint as education commissioner. And Gaetz gives the current governor credit for pushing for teacher merit-pay incentives and supporting reforms to make high schools less reliant on the FCAT assessment. But “all of us, including Charlie Crist, are stewards of Jeb Bush’s accomplishments and his innovations.”

Sen. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat running for attorney general and a frequent critic of Bush’s reforms, agreed Crist was “misusing the study.”

“It was not a study of how good they’re doing, but how many measurements they have.”

Crist told reporters Tuesday he had hoped to do more on the education front, but that Floridians understood the economy had forced his administration to "scale back."

"We've had to scale back, but the people get that. They've had to scale back," Crist said.