Miami-Dade school district keeps ‘A’ grade. See where your school ranked

Miami-Dade and Broward County school districts are giving themselves a round of applause for another year of “A” grades.

Both public school districts continue to outperform the state of Florida average testing marks for most academic subject and skill tests. They’re improving, too – as they have in recent years, and at a similar rate as the rest of the state.

“Our school district has been improving student academic achievement for four years in a row, and the story is one that we call a trajectory of continuous success,” Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres said at a press conference announcing the results.

The school year marked the seventh consecutive year that Miami-Dade earned an “A” grade from the state. This year, about half of all school districts — 34 of 67, including most large ones like Broward and Palm Beach — got “A” grades.

School district grades are based on several factors. Those include overall test scores from an assessment called the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) as well as end-of-course tests. They also factor in graduation rates, growth in reading and math scores year-over-year, growth among the lowest quarter of test-takers, percentage of accelerated middle schoolers and high schoolers.

Both districts and schools get grade letter ratings, and the data includes results from both traditional public schools and charter schools. In Miami-Dade, the only school to have gotten a “D” grade from the state was Colēgiate Preparatory Academy, an Academica school.

The results showed continuous improvement in math, English language arts, science, civics and history for Miami-Dade. In 19 of 21 tested areas, Miami-Dade County Public Schools students performed better than the state average. In two – science in grades 5 and 8 – they performed slightly worse than the rest of the state.

In Broward County, Superintendent Howard Hepburn also celebrated the news. It marked the third year in a row the district earned an “A” grade.

“BCPS, for the third year in a row, [has] no D or F schools, which is huge,” said at a press conference to a round of applause. “We’re one of few districts in the state that can actually say that. We’ve increased our number of A schools or B [schools], and we’ve decreased the number of C schools as well.”

Of the three major South Florida counties, Miami-Dade schools had the highest percentage of “A” grades at 63.2%. Broward and Palm Beach posted 61.3% and 54%, respectively.

The good news comes at a difficult time for public school districts. Enrollment is declining across the board in traditional public schools as the national birthrate continues to fall, charter school enrollment remains robust, private school voucher use increases and the number of immigrant students has flatlined.

Due to these trends, Miami-Dade is closing nine schools this summer and Broward is closing six.

But both Dotres and Hepburn indicated the overall good news could translate into a good result for public schools, as a referendum to keep a property tax going towards schools is on the ballot in both counties this November. Dotres said it “absolutely” bodes well for voters to approve the tax, as they did in 2018 and 2022 referendums.

“This, of course, is a tremendous positive, because it reaffirms and it allows us to tell the story to our community about how our schools are doing and how our students are achieving because of the direct effort of the teachers and also the safety net that is provided in each of our schools through our amazing school police officers,” Dotres said.

Per the state’s school grading system, charter schools are slightly outperforming traditional public schools in Miami-Dade. About 73% of charter schools got an “A” grade, compared to 58.8% of traditional public schools. A larger share of traditional public schools got “B” grades (29.2%) than charter schools (13.8%), but about the same percentage got “C” grades, with both schooling types around 12%.

What does an ‘A’ mean?

Grade ratings don’t tell the full story of student aptitude and success, according to Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami specializing in school finance.

National assessment scores, which are not yet out for this year, show that Florida’s eighth graders have been trending below the national average in math for the last few years. Reading scores are higher than the national average, but Baker pointed out that they’ve been declining in recent years. Miami-Dade is doing somewhat better than the state as a whole on these assessments, and Baker’s own analyses confirm that.

But, Baker said that’s in the context of a state that has started to lag behind.

“Miami-Dade and Broward are, perhaps, ‘A’ districts in the Florida context. But nationally, they are ‘C’ districts in a ‘C-’ state with ‘D’ funding,” Baker said.

Another factor in the increasing scores across the board in Florida could be the relative youth of the FAST test, which was first used in 2022. It’s normal for scores to improve in the initial years of a test as administrators, teachers and students grow more familiar with it, Baker said.

“We have conflicting trends. While we don’t have the most recent data for the national assessment, Florida scores are dropping faster than most other states. Reading from ’22 to ’25 dropped the fastest among the states. So, my guess would be any kind of incremental gains on the state’s assessments, a lot of it is about test familiarity gain,” Baker said.

Still, Baker gave some plaudits to Miami-Dade for outperforming what he said was relatively poor overall funding.

“Florida districts are relatively efficient with what they have. They’ve got generally inadequate funding, and they outperform their funding level, but in outperforming their funding level, they’re still generally below average nationally. But, Miami-Dade and Broward are about average,” Baker said.