DeFlorida Blueprint: How Ron DeSantis’s education policies could shape the 2024 race
Jeremiah Poff
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DeFlorida Blueprint is a five-part series examining the legislative and policy record of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Florida legislature wraps up its 2023 session, DeSantis is widely expected to declare he is running for the Republican presidential nomination, putting him on a collision course with former President Donald Trump. The first part of this series will examine his record on education.
The Florida legislature adjourned from its 2023 legislative session Friday after delivering a wish list of conservative bills to the desk of Ron DeSantis ahead of an expected presidential campaign launch.
Since the summer of 2020, Florida’s Republican governor, who narrowly won election to his first term in 2018 before winning a landslide reelection campaign last year, has anointed himself a trailblazer on Republican education policy, and conservative activists are calling for other Republican-controlled states to follow Florida’s lead.
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The Florida blueprint
Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a conservative political action committee, told the Washington Examiner that DeSantis’s approach to education “offers a new way forward for reforming America’s education system” and is one that conservatives should take note of.
“The lesson conservatives should take away from DeSantis’s education agenda is that you can and must use the political power that voters entrust you with after getting elected,” Schilling said. “For so long, Republicans were elected and given power from the people to fix America’s problems, and they almost never used it outside of giving corporations more tax cuts and to start more wars that no one wants. We should take this model to every area where progressives have taken advantage at a minimum to reverse and tear down the destructive institutions and policies they’ve created.”
The pugnacious Florida governor, known for his squabbles with the press, put himself front and center of the COVID-19 discourse when he ordered all schools in the Sunshine State to reopen for full in-person classes five days a week in the summer of 2020.
The order touched off a fight with school districts throughout the state, many of which attempted to resist the governor’s directive, but ultimately DeSantis prevailed. Just as quickly, a new fight began over whether or not the districts could require students to wear masks. The governor promptly signed an executive order in the summer of 2021 prohibiting districts from mandating masks.
In 2021, DeSantis began a legislative and executive branch policy push on education that continued through the 2023 legislative session and has provided him with a substantial record to tout to voters as he is widely expected to launch a presidential campaign in the coming weeks.
Parental rights
The bulk of DeSantis’s policy reforms have come at the K-12 level, with several initiatives generating substantial national press coverage, beginning with his push to fully open schools in the fall of 2020. From there, DeSantis has molded himself as a champion of parental rights, most notably signing into law the Parental Rights in Education Act in 2022, which was dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics who took issue with a provision that barred classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity prior to fourth grade.
The primary purpose of the law was to outline the rights of parents in school settings and prohibit school staff from keeping parents in the dark about their child’s well-being at school, including if the child wished to identify as a gender that differed from their biological sex.
But the controversial law is only one of the several DeSantis has pushed in recent legislative sessions. He also championed efforts to allow military veterans who have not completed degrees to work as teachers and pushed for pay raises for teachers. In the 2023 legislative session, he also pushed for the passage of a “Teachers Bill of Rights.”
Curriculum requirements
On the curriculum front, DeSantis has signed bills requiring high school students to take financial literacy courses, as well as implementing more stringent history standards, including requiring schools to teach about the history of communism.
Not all of these reforms were pushed through the legislature. In April, the governor’s Department of Education expanded the restrictions on sexual orientation and gender identity content in classrooms to all grades, building on the requirements set for in the 2022 parental rights law.
In January, the Florida Department of Education provided yet another flashpoint of controversy after it blocked the College Board from piloting its Advanced Placement African American Studies course in the state. The DeSantis administration said the pilot framework of the course potentially violated state law due to its inclusion of concepts such as “Black Queer Studies.”
Not everyone agrees with his tactics. Sasha Tirador, a Florida-based Democratic consultant, told the Washington Examiner that the Florida governor’s wholehearted embrace of the culture war was harmful to the state but acknowledged it could help him in a Republican presidential primary.
“There’s nothing heroic about what he’s done,” Tirador said. “This is not ‘I think the curriculum should be A, B or C,’ This is ‘I don’t think your kids should know A, B or C.’ Well, that’s not for you to decide; that is for the local school boards to decide, who, by the way, Mr. Governor, are … elected by [their] local constituents.”
School choice
In March, DeSantis signed a comprehensive bill that expanded eligibility for the state’s school choice program to all students, thereby empowering families to cover education costs, including private school tuition, with state funds.
The universal school choice program is one area in which Florida has actually followed other Republican-led states. Last year Arizona became the first state to pass universal school choice and has been joined by Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah this year.
Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, noted that under DeSantis’s leadership, Florida earned top marks in the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card.
“DeSantis’s policy agenda has protected children, empowered parents, and given educators the resources they need to set students up for success,” Anderson told the Washington Examiner. “Aside from banning divisive CRT curriculum and protecting students from inappropriate and radical gender ideology content, Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature have worked together to put parents back in the driver’s seat with historic education freedom measures and a Parental Bill of Rights.”
Anderson said the educational issues and policies championed by DeSantis are a key driver of parental engagement in the political process as the 2024 presidential election looms.
“Voters are looking to candidates who have a clear policy vision and solutions to the problems they see in their children’s classrooms,” she said. “They want a proven leader who is willing to stand up to big education and call out the nonsense being peddled by liberal activists attempting to infiltrate our school systems. … Every candidate should expect this issue to be front and center as we move deeper into the 2024 presidential election cycle.”
Higher education
The Florida governor’s embrace of the education culture wars also stretched into the realm of higher education, where he attempted to restrict the teaching of critical race theory at public universities through the STOP WOKE Act, which has encountered numerous legal roadblocks as critics have decried the law as an assault on academic freedom.
The governor has also moved to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, changed the rules for how state universities must apply for accreditation, reformed tenure protections for college professors, and appointed a group of hard-line conservatives to the board of trustees of one of the state’s most liberal colleges.
In January, DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of the New College of Florida and tasked them with remaking the school in the image of Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal arts college in Michigan. The board got right to work and fired the college’s president within weeks of taking over and hired DeSantis’s former commissioner of education to fill the post on an interim basis.
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Schilling told the Washington Examiner that he considered DeSantis’s appointments to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees among the most consequential education reform efforts the governor has directed since taking office in January 2019 and said it could serve as a model at the federal level.
“The most impressive thing he’s done is shown conservatives how to no longer be pushovers regarding higher education,” Schilling said. “Conservatives never use government funds in a productive manner to curb left-wing power grabs. With the New College of Florida, DeSantis is showing conservatives what we could do from the federal level across the country. It’s beautiful.”