Many studies conducted in the last decades report that very few elementary-grades students understand the meaning of = in mathematics, and that upper-elementary students do not understand it any better than the lower-elementary students do. Using data from thousands of Florida elementary students, we show that students in Florida perform ten to twenty percentage points higher, on average, on items designed to assess their understanding of = than what has been reported previously in the literature. Implications for students' preparation for secondary-level mathematics and how these findings may relate to changes in mathematics standards in Florida are briefly discussed.