Students in Florida are falling behind in reading and math, compared to other states, and one in three children miss too much school, according to a nationwide report called the Education Scorecard, released on Wednesday.
"Achievement fell during the pandemic, and in all but eight states, it continued falling between '22 and '25 in reading. That should be alarming all of us," said researcher Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.
The Education Scorecard has come out annually since 2022. It looks at test scores for about 35 million students across the country in grades 3-8.
The report card did not measure all 50 states because some changed their tests from 2024 to 2025 and couldn't be used for comparison. Others had low test participation rates and were excluded because of that.
While some states made post-pandemic gains in reading, Florida students' reading ability declined the most in the last four years. The average Florida student is more than half a grade level behind where the average student was in 2022.
That downward trend shows scores are “declining rapidly,” said co-author Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University.
In other words, Florida’s trend in average reading scores is the worst among 35 states studied between 2022 and 2025, according to the Education Scorecard.
Asked for comment, Cassie Edwards, director of communications at the Florida Department of Education, said: “It’s no surprise that a failing woke institution would rank Florida, a national leader in education, last whenever possible,” according to an email to WUSF.
Edwards pointed out that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test that compares states in math, reading, science and writing proficiency at various grade levels, found “Florida actually outperformed the nation and ranked in the Top 10 in Grade 4 Reading performance in 2024.”
Edwards also questioned the validity of the NAEP itself, and “what NAEP is assessing compared to the academic content standards that states are actually teaching today.”
However, Reardon said "generally NAEP and state test trends are highly correlated," and pointed to data that showed Florida students' declines in reading were "larger than average."
Looking back to 2017, Florida ranked 5th in the country for NAEP scores in fourth grade reading. By 2024, Florida ranked 10th.
And for 8th grade reading, in 2017, Florida ranked 25th. By 2024, the state fell to 43rd.
Florida’s education commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas last year lamented that the NAEP doesn’t include students in private schools and homeschool environments, saying the scores would be higher for Florida if those students were included.
Why reading may be suffering
Pasco school board member Jessica Jecusco-Wright says the state is missing an opportunity for improvement by dismissing the scores.
“I think that when the state dismisses these sorts of statistics and data, I mean, obviously, I cannot speak for them, but I think it's a mistake," she said.
She said a variety of factors could be at play, but it’s not likely to relate to culture war politics, such as efforts to restrict certain books in schools.
“The movement toward removing titles across the state, I personally don't believe that that has an impact on our literacy rate, and the reason why is because we have seen our literacy rate decline consistently prior to that being an issue,” she said.
“And I truly believe that it comes back to a few different criteria. One: too much reliance on technology, even at a very early age,” she said.
Also, fewer teachers are trained in reading instruction these days. And students spend more time on reading and analyzing passages, instead of complete books, said Jecusco-Wright.
According to the report, all of the states which improved in reading between 2022 and 2025 were implementing comprehensive “science of reading” practices, like teaching phonics.
But in Florida, the picture is less clear. Statewide, Florida reported implementing many reforms based on the science of teaching reading to young children, as did Arizona and Nebraska. But in all three states, literacy still fell behind.
While the report did not pinpoint reasons why, Kane said it should be a national priority “to figure out which of these policy elements are most important. Which of these are having the biggest impact on student achievement?”
In Jecusco-Wright’s view, the impact of early literacy in kindergarten through second grade – when foundations in phonics are built -- could be affecting progress in grades 3-8.
“There are a lot of concerns with how much learning has become gamified,” said Jecusco-Wright. “A student that is passively receiving information through a game or through a video that can have different connotations than a truly engaged learner and one that's actually working through the information in what we would call a productive struggle.”
Math, absences
Other parts of the report showed Florida students are still falling behind in math, too, compared to pre-pandemic levels. Florida ranked 24th out of 38 states in academic growth in math.
In math, the average student is performing about .12 grade equivalents above their 2022 level, but almost half a grade behind where students were in 2019.
Some districts, including Pasco, have seen math scores decline below pre-pandemic levels. Other counties are improving in math, including Lake, DeSoto, Indian River, Levy, and Walton.
And when it comes to chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing more than 10% of a school year, the rate was 32.3% in 2022 and dropped to 29% in 2025. However, absence rates still remain almost 9 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
Nationwide, the education scorecard found trends point to learning loss that predates the pandemic and goes back to about 2013, coinciding with a phase-out of high-stakes accountability testing and the introduction of widespread smartphone use among children.
But it remains unclear whether the issue is cell phones in schools, mental health struggles due to social media, failure to read because kids are too busy scrolling, or too many screens and technology in the learning environment.
"These four different categories of arguments people make, they're often get kind of confounded in the conversations, and we don't know -- certainly from our study and from any other study -- how to disentangle those yet," said Kane.
