The Florida Department of Education says it wants to make sure school grades are accurate before releasing them. This statement comes after five school districts questioned the validity of students' scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which the state uses to grade schools.

Hillsborough, Duval, Broward, Miami-Dade and Leon counties claim they have seen anomalies in test scores, so the counties have urged the state to postpone releasing school grades until experts can review all the data. According to D.O.E. spokesman Tom Butler, the state is hiring an independent third party to study the issue.

However, Butler maintains that the D.O.E. has the utmost confidence in FCAT results. “We’ve had multiple reviews of these results both by ourselves, the testing contractor and an independent third party, the Buros Institute, and all have had positive findings on the results,” Butler said.

The new third party reviewer is Human Resource Research Organization. Butler says the company has a solid national reputation for doing this type of work.

The five affected districts say the review should focus on the FCAT results of their lowest performing students, which are worse than normal. Butler says the D.O.E. is aware of the issue and believes the cause may be that those students made big gains in recent years and were not able to repeat that kind of success.