Bob Griffin, the Senior Education Research Fellow with the Alaska Policy Forum, recently authored a column arguing against increased education funding in Alaska and instead supported unspecified “refocus(ing) of our (existing) significant fiscal effort.”
By way of example, Griffin stated that Florida has a relatively high percentage of graduating high school students with a score of 3 (out of a possible 5) or higher on an AP test despite being “ranked last” in education “funding adequacy.” The relevant web-available College Board report entitled “AP Program Results: Class of 2022,” however, discloses that this result simply reflects that relatively more students in Florida take an AP test.
Rather than rely on this incomplete and limited statistic, a better measure of Florida’s academic performance is the more broadly used and referenced SAT. A Feb. 15 Fox 13 Tampa Bay news article titled “Fox 13 Investigates Declining Test Scores” notes that “Florida’s mean SAT score of 966 ranks near the bottom of the nation — 46th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C. And Florida’s mean score has dropped each year since 2005.”
Emulating Florida’s educational funding would be to join Florida in a race to the bottom.
— Neil O’Donnell
Anchorage
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