Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis praised President Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday, saying the move would “put American excellence at the forefront of education policy” and remove a bureaucratic obstacle to success.
DeSantis told The Wall Street Journal, “Abolishing the department and reinvigorating the state control of education would allow states like Florida to better serve the needs of their students, teachers, and parents.” He praised the success of his state in allowing local control over education.
The Governor noted that his administration in Florida has taken on the “bureaucratic excess” of Obama and Biden’s administrations in terms of education policies, focusing on student- and parent-friendly approaches.
DeSantis stated, “We abolished Common Core because it did not work for our children. Florida replaced it with content-rich, high-quality standards called Florida’s Benchmarks For Excellent Student Thinking (BEST), which outline the expectations of each grade level.”
The Governor added that Florida has stopped “high-stakes exams” and switched to progress testing. This resulted in significant improvements year-over-year.
Following the conservative reformers’ actions, the state also enacted universal choice in schools, eliminating financial responsibility restrictions, and an enrollment camp for school choice scholarships.
The governor stated that Florida will have more than half a million students in 2024 who are using a school-choice scholarship to attend private or homeschooling.
DeSantis’ administration has also supported the expansion of charter schools, allowing them to enroll over 400,000 Florida students. The governor stated that the majority of charter school students are low-income, but they still perform better than their peers in traditional districts.
Florida has been ranked No. 1 by the Heritage Foundation and ALEC Index of State Education Freedom. DeSantis stated that Florida has been the No. 1 state in the country for education freedom for several years in a line.
The governor stated, “We also returned education to the core principles by teaching math, reading, history, and science and eliminated DEI. We expanded educational options and made data-driven investments supporting positive results.”
DeSantis stated that such changes were made while opposing policies that had been pushed by Department of Education. This included the Biden administration’s attempt to deny Florida federal money for school lunches because he signed in 2021 a bill on transgender sports participation.
How absurd is it that the Federal Government would force states to allow men to compete in women’s sports? DeSantis said, “For decades the federal government has tied our federal education dollars to more strings than we could have ever imagined, both for secondary and postsecondary.”
DeSantis pointed out that Republicans have called for the end of the department since 1981 when Ronald Reagan stated that eliminating the Department, which was then in its second-year, would guarantee that local needs are met.
He concluded that “Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education was a step necessary to allow states to achieve their full potential, and to copy the Florida model. President Trump’s leadership will be demonstrated by his fulfilling a Republican campaign promise that dates back four decades. Then, the states will be able to get down to business and improve student performance.”
