Eight years into ACPS’s equity plan, the results are dismal
OPINION
BY LEN CABRERA
Once again, the Florida Department of Education’s (FLDOE’s) academic assessments show that Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) are a model example of how not to do public education. (See the overall 2025-26 results here.) Eight years into the district’s equity plan, the performance gaps between black students and white students, in both math and English Language Arts (ELA), are among the worst in the state, and the gap between the academic performance of ACPS students and Florida students is widening. Student progress monitoring over the course of the year has been near the bottom of the state for all four years of tracking.
In 2018, I warned that the School Board’s equity plan would fail because it did not focus on achievement. It focused solely on skin color, while ignoring other attributes that contribute to poor student performance, such as poverty, single-parent homes, and truancy. The School Board blamed systemic racism for the black-white achievement gap, although their own data acknowledge that black children have significantly higher absentee rates than students of other races. In the years following this singular focus on narrowing the black-white achievement gap, the performance of both white and black students has fallen, relative to their state peers.
When the equity plan was being discussed, one of the main drivers was UF’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR) January 2018 report, “Understanding Racial Inequity in Alachua County.” The report was already outdated when it was published, but it was also used by the County to pass an equity charter amendment.
In a July 1 press release, ACPS highlighted the “encouraging academic gains across the district” – and it is true that the overall performance has improved. In the final year before the equity plan (2017-18), 29% of black students in ACPS schools were at grade level in ELA, and 30% were at grade level in math. Those numbers technically improved to 38% and 32% in 2025-26, but the ranks of those scores among the state’s 67 county school districts are lower: a drop from 49th to 56th in ELA and from 55th to 62nd in math. (ACPS did not mention that white student performance in math has also declined since 2017-18.) Also, while the black-white performance gaps for both ELA and math got smaller, the gap at the state level narrowed more, so the ACPS gap ranks with the worst in the state.
According to FLDOE, those student comparisons from 2017-18 to 2025-26 aren’t valid. The assessment site warns that because new standards were implemented in the 2022-23 school year, “assessments cannot be compared to the former ELA and Mathematics assessment used from 2014-15 through 2021-22.” What we can do, however, is look at how ACPS student performance changed relative to their state peers. By that standard, white student performance, black student performance, and the performance gap have gotten worse in the eight years since the equity plan was adopted.
Black-white performance gap for ELA
The BEBR report used 3rd-grade English Language Arts (ELA) performance from the 2015-16 school year. At that time, the black-white gap in Alachua County was 46.3 percentage points (74.0% of white students and 27.7% of black students scored 3 or better on the state assessment exam). That placed ACPS in the bottom five county school districts. In the final year before the equity plan (2017-18), the gap was 45.0 percentage points, the sixth worst in the state. In the 2025-26 school year, the 3rd-grade black-white gap for ACPS was 44.2; while this is a drop of 2.1 percentage points from 2015-16, it still ranked as the sixth-largest gap in the state. Meanwhile, the statewide black-white gap dropped almost 8 percentage points (31 percentage points in 2015-16 to 23 in 2025-26).
Looking at ELA overall (grades 3-10), ACPS’s black-white gap is increasing, relative to the state. In 2017-18, the gap was 44.9 percentage points, the fourth worst in the state. For 2025-26, the gap narrowed to 38.6 percentage points, but that is now the second worst in the state. During the same period, the ELA black-white performance gap for the state overall narrowed by more than 8 percentage points.
At the start of the equity plan in 2018, the large black-white performance gap in Alachua was attributed to our white students outperforming their state peers by over 8 percentage points while our black students performed about 8 percentage points worse than their state peers. In the 2025-26 school year, both groups performed worse, relative to the state as a whole. ACPS white students have fallen to less than 6 percentage points above state peers, and black performance is now 12 percentage points below state peers.
Black-white performance gap for math
Overall math scores combine grades 3 through 8 with algebra and geometry end-of-course (EOC) assessments. (Eighth-grade scores are low because the top students at that point have progressed to algebra or geometry, which are assessed separately.) The final year before the equity plan (2017-18) had a 45-percentage-point gap between black and white students, the worst in the state. After the 2025-26 school year, the gap dropped to 40 percentage points, still the worst in the state. Meanwhile, the black-white gap for the state as a whole dropped from 30 percentage points in 2015-2016 to 22 in 2025-26.
As with the ELA scores, the performance of ACPS white and black students relative to their state peers got worse in the eight years since the district’s equity plan. In 2017-18, about 6 percentage points more ACPS white students scored 3 or better on the math achievement exams than their state peers. That advantage dropped to 2 percentage points in 2025-26. For ACPS black students, the gap to their state peers increased from 9 percentage points lower in 2017-18 to 16 percentage points lower in 2025-26.
Removing the algebra and geometry EOCs makes the ACPS math results worse. Only 30% of black students and 72% of white students scored a 3 or better, ranking them 65th and 22nd in the state, respectively. In 2017-18, they ranked 55th and 8th, respectively. Also, the black-white performance gap was 42 percentage points (still the worst in the state) in 2025-26, compared to the state gap of 23 percentage points; note that ACPS’s gap stopped decreasing after 2023-24 and has actually increased slightly, while the state gap continues to decline. The graphs below show math results without algebra and geometry EOCs. We do not have this data prior to 2021-22 because it is no longer on the FLDOE website.
No accountability
Despite wasting resources on their misguided equity plan and ruining students’ futures with a subpar education, don’t expect the School Board Members or bureaucrats running ACPS to admit their mistakes. They don’t have to, because the electorate refuses to hold them accountable. After years of overseeing an “education system” with about half of graduates unable to read at grade level, it is still common for School Board members to be re-elected; this August, voters have the chance to deny Tina Certain a promotion to the County Commission. When you fill out your ballot, remember the results of their repeated statements that it’s “all about the students.”
Any parent who relies upon the welfare of the State to provide for their children’s education is getting exactly what they deserve. Complaining about it makes you look like an EBT cardholder complaining about what you can’t buy with your welfare card.
Try being fiscally responsible for your children, and enroll them in a private school, where you will have much more control over education quality. You’ll end up with smarter kids and you’ll feel better about yourself as a parent. If you don’t feel that’s a financial option for you, then it’s a sign from God that you had children you could not afford to have, and that’s on you, not the SBAC.
A child’s intelligence and success are shaped by parental involvement, character, and community support—none of which carry a private school price tag. Holding the SBAC accountable is exactly what responsible parents and taxpayers do…or should be doing. A parent doesn’t magically have more ‘control of education quality’ just by sending their children to a private school. They just get to pick the campus—assuming the school even picks their child(ren) in the first place.
Demanding accountability for the tax dollars we all pay into our public schools isn’t a lack of fiscal responsibility—it’s a civic duty. The public education system itself hasn’t failed; the people running it are failing the system.
Equating a parent’s capability and right to raise a family strictly with their ability to cut a check for private tuition is pretty elitist. Responsible and involved parents don’t just abandon public education when leadership stumbles; they demand better management from the people running it. The real problem is the local voters don’t demand better.
That’s not only common sense—it’s elementary.
Tough to fix culturally ingrained ignorance.
It’s the “tyranny of low expectations” in action.
Dems use one-syllable words more when talking to Blacks, it’s been demonstrated.
College towns subconsciously excuse the most aberrant behaviors in mortal fear of being called “racist”. It self-perpetuates generation after generation — so NGOs keep getting public funding.
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These race-based summaries should not be happening, except that there is a huge, highly paid white-collar industry that now depends on cranking them out and pushing their importance. Their very existence contravenes MLK’s hope “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” When equal outcomes are demanded without any conscientious concern for the sources of the outcomes, a suffocating spoils system is bound to result.
It all starts at home.
Our superindendant make 292K a year plus housing, phone and car allowances yet our schools performance is hideous. Her secretary makes over 100K. I think we spend our money wrong.
Why is it so difficult for alachua county schools to teach black children?
I believe the question should be why some Black children in Alachua County have such difficulty learning.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t working so good..