Florida policymakers will officially begin the 2025 Legislative Session this week, kicking off 60 days of work to tackle the state’s biggest challenges.

The last legislative biennium produced some of the most ambitious education policies the state has seen since Gov. Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan: Universal school choice; comprehensive math policy; stronger literacy policies, including bans on the harmful three-cueing instructional practice; improved education-to-workforce pathways and supports; limits on cellphone use in classrooms and access to social media; and record teacher pay increases.

There’s much to celebrate, but as our Chair and former Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, always says, success is never final, and reform is never complete. When it comes to education, there’s never a time to take our foot off the gas.

Recent scores from the Nation’s Report Card — the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — show that policymakers need to accelerate and expand student-centered policies now more than ever.

Florida students saw significant declines in NAEP reading and math scores last year, continuing a post-pandemic downward trend. Eighth grade math scores hit a 20-year low, while reading scores dropped to the lowest level in over 25 years. Fourth grade reading scores fell to their lowest point since 2003, and while fourth grade math scores remained steady compared to 2022, they have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. We’ve overindulged in the glory of achieving strong national rankings while not paying as close attention to the warning signs in our own performance data, which have shown signs of plateaus — and now declines — for the last decade.

Meanwhile, states like Mississippi and Louisiana are following the no-excuses playbook Florida wrote in the early 2000s, which led us to become a national leader in education.

Just a decade ago, Mississippi was dead last in student outcomes. Then, they adopted Florida’s approach to literacy and school accountability. The result? Mississippi has been the top state for growth in literacy and math outcomes in the country over the past decade. Today, Mississippi’s fourth graders outperform Florida’s fourth graders in literacy, and it’s the best state in the nation for low-income student outcomes in fourth grade reading.

Similarly, five years ago, Louisiana was ranked last in the nation in almost every NAEP student performance outcome. Today, Louisiana’s fourth graders are ranked 15th in reading, leading the nation in reading growth during each of the last two testing cycles. Pelican state students have also climbed the ranks in math, and Louisiana is one of only two states where fourth graders have exceeded pre-pandemic outcomes.

Florida cannot rest on its laurels. While some policymakers in Florida have been talking about weakening long-standing policies like fourth grade promotion and high school exit exams that yielded historic gains for students, other states are borrowing our tried-and-tested education agenda and getting their own positive results. We can and should get back to raising the bar with the same bold leadership and relentless sense of urgency that put — and kept — Florida at the top of the pack in the first place.

The Foundation for Florida’s Future is committed to working with policymakers this Session to get Florida back on the right track leading the nation in student outcomes.

And we can get there with a policy agenda focused on three areas (1) protecting and improving student success, (2) expanding education opportunities, and (3) preparing the future workforce.

Protecting and improving student & teacher success

The playbook Florida adopted and has maintained for over 20 years still works, but we need to return to some of the policies we have abandoned over time. Specifically, Florida policymakers should:

• Reject policy proposals that seek to water down or eliminate the state’s third grade promotion policy and high school graduation requirements.
• Reinstate dedicated funding for reading coaches, especially in small and rural districts that often lack any reading coaches and give authority back to the Department of Education to scrutinize and approve district reading plans to ensure they meet Florida’s standard.
• Ensure teacher candidates and current teachers have access to enough math content to effectively communicate math topics by establishing minimum requirements for initial teacher preparation and competency-based programs and expanding existing math professional learning opportunities. Florida currently ranks last in the nation for the average math content teacher candidates are exposed to before entering a classroom.
• Address chronic absenteeism by adopting a standard definition, collecting and centralizing better data, and building action plans to re-engage absent students.
• Elevate teacher voices in the state by ensuring union recertification elections are fair and that a majority of union members weigh in on their own representation.
• Eliminate learning distractions that impact both academic achievement and student mental health by creating phone-free schools.

Expanding education opportunities

Florida is the national leader in empowering families with educational options, but more can be done to improve the choices for families. Lawmakers should:

• Improve the state’s Schools of Hope charter program so that it does not lose out on attracting the highest-quality charter school operators in the country, like Success Academy, to serve the state’s neediest students and communities.
• Take action to pre-empt unfair and, in some cases, prejudicial local zoning ordinances that make opening new charter and private schools challenging.
• Allow families participating in the state’s school choice programs to enroll their children in high-quality, full-time virtual education programs.

Preparing the future workforce

Florida’s future is inextricably linked to our ability to educate and train tomorrow’s workforce. More can be done to ensure students have access to opportunities to learn and acquire valuable workplace skills. Specifically, Florida policymakers should:

• Expand the state’s successful Workforce Development Capitalization Incentive Grant program to include charter schools that want to begin or expand workforce training programs.
• Improve and expand the state’s money-back guarantee program to ensure Florida Colleges are focused on offering programs that will yield a strong return on student investment.

There are competing priorities in every Legislative Session, but Florida has long maintained its commitment to education by consistently prioritizing our students each Session. As policymakers embark on the next 60 days, they can consider policies that put students first, hold schools accountable for student success, and better prepare students for the future of work.

You can read more about our priorities here.

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Patricia Levesque is executive director of the Foundation for Florida’s Future.

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