Is DeSantis getting ready for a Youngkin-like education breakthrough in 2024?
Haisten Willis
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is engaged in a war of words with the College Board as he continues to embrace the issue of education ahead of a potential 2024 presidential run.
Education has become a bigger issue for conservatives over the last few years and one that could be a winner in future elections, argues Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior.
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“Going into 2024, all candidates for elected office, including the presidency, need to keep banging the drum on what has happened in our schools over the past several decades and highlight plans to fix them and get us back on track so that future generations can compete internationally,” said Prior, author of the upcoming book Parents of the World Unite.
DeSantis, who is known for his embrace of cultural issues and is considered a top 2024 presidential candidate even though he has yet to announce, dove into education politics when he rejected the College Board’s new Advanced Placement African American Studies course in Florida.
The College Board’s preliminary course framework, dated February 2022, outlined a number of topics that the course would cover, including the African slave trade, segregation, and the civil rights movement.
But the course also outlined lesson plans on topics such as “Black Queer Studies,” “‘postracial’ racism and colorblindness,” and support for slavery reparations, including a Democratic Party congressional proposal to establish a committee to study reparations. “Afrofuturism” was also an included topic, wherein students could watch the Marvel Studios film Black Panther to study “the cultural aesthetics and practices of Afrofuturism.”
The Florida Department of Education said the content of the course violates state law, including the 2022 Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited public schools, including state colleges, from incorporating aspects of critical race theory into classroom instruction. DeSantis has also signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity before fourth grade, as part of his wider education initiatives.
The College Board later made revisions to the coursework while saying DeSantis wasn’t the reason for the alterations, then released a scathing statement last weekend claiming that Florida officials asked “vague, uninformed questions” and that it was a mistake to treat them with the courtesy afforded to education agencies.
That statement came after organizations, including the National Black Justice Coalition, called for College Board head David Coleman to step down last Friday.
DeSantis has also faced blowback, with civil rights attorney Ben Crump threatening a lawsuit and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying the decision was incomprehensible and would block “the study of black Americans.”
Yet the issue may prove to be a winning one with voters. In this respect, DeSantis will try to use the playbook pioneered by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), who rode a wave of parental support over school closings and other educational issues to an upset win over Terry McAuliffe in 2021.
Youngkin has kept up that pace recently, saying the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action toolkit will not be tolerated.
But it’s not clear if Youngkin’s win, which came near the peak of the mask wars, will translate nationally with COVID-19 now largely in the rearview.
Recent polling has been contradictory.
The National Parents Union found in January that 46% of surveyed parents trusted Democrats more to lead on education policy, compared to 38% of Republicans. On the other hand, a Democrats for Education Reform poll conducted last summer found that 47% of likely midterm voters trusted Republicans more on education, compared to 43% of Democrats.
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DeSantis continues making moves on the education front, calling two weeks ago for the abolishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies at Florida colleges, which indicates he thinks the issue will be a winner with voters.
“The Left’s response thus far seems to be to demonize parents, accuse them of being liars, and gaslight Americans in order to hold on to its monopoly of our K-12 education system,” Prior said.
He continued, “If they were smart, they would cut ties with their woke base and recognize that after COVID, parents of all political persuasions saw what was going on with our schools, and they are no longer going to just trust the Educational Industrial Complex to teach their children with no accountability to their parents.”