The great education gaslight
Jack Elbaum
Video Embed
Attacks on Florida have increased sharply since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) announced he was running for president. They have been focused on everything from housing to guns to Disney. However, the most frequent area of political attack on Florida recently has been education. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) tweeted out a picture suggesting Florida was keeping children from reading books, Politico ran a headline reading “Ron DeSantis upended education in Florida. He’s coming for your state next,” and travel advisories for Florida coming from the NAACP and others focused on DeSantis’s education policy. I could go on.
All of this paints a picture of Florida as a type of dystopia where the schools are failing and knowledge is intentionally kept from the population. The problem is not only that the caricature is untrue, but also that the reality is actually the opposite.
BIDEN NEEDS TO SHELVE TAX INCREASES AND FOCUS ON SPENDING
Earlier this month, US News and World Report came out with its new education rankings by state. It ranked Florida as No. 1 nationally — placing 14th in K-12 rankings and first in higher education. This is consistent with other rankings as well. The Department of Education’s Nation’s Report Card measures state-by-state performance in math, reading, science, and writing. Florida’s results are the fourth-highest in the nation, meaning they score “significantly higher” than the national average. Additionally, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Report Card, which measures states on metrics such as academic standards and performance, teacher quality, and school choice, gives Florida a B+, which is the second-best ranking in the country.
Three of the top four educational quality rankings put Florida in the top five in the nation. This is a far stretch from the image that the media and liberal politicians are pushing. And Florida’s record on school reopenings after COVID-19 makes this doubly true.
I have no reason to believe that education in Florida is perfect. Of course, it is not. Moreover, it is reasonable to disagree with some of DeSantis’s education policies. I do. However, to suggest that Florida is a uniquely bad state when it comes to education, such that it warrants attack after attack on it, is simply unreasonable.
The gap between the facts and the narrative here is massive — which is becoming a theme when it comes to media coverage and political rhetoric about Florida. There is no word to describe it other than gaslighting.
This begs the question of why these hyperbolic attacks are happening if they are so removed from what’s actually going on. The answer is surprisingly simple: partisan politics. DeSantis is running for president, and many in the media do not like that. Therefore, they have decided to work overtime to try and make DeSantis and Florida toxic — even if it means putting a wholly disproportionate focus on Florida’s perceived shortcomings rather than on the actual failing conditions of more than a few states.
The problem is that this strategy is just plainly dishonest. To suggest the state’s education system is so bad to the point where it borders on dystopia while it actually ranks at the top is just wrong. As is the suggestion that it is a particularly dangerous place for people of color and LGBT people, when by all available data, it is a much better and safer place to have those identities in Florida than New York or California. When a state is consistently at the top in terms of in-migration, with hundreds of thousands of people moving there each year while others are losing similar numbers, it is clearly doing something right.
It is a dereliction of journalistic responsibility to present such a misleading picture for what are so clearly political purposes. But that is the state of the modern media. It is a good thing most readers can see right through it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.