Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis applauded President Donald Trump's plans to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, saying Wednesday that doing so will put "American excellence at the forefront of education policy" while eliminating a bureaucracy that stifles success.
"Abolishing the department and reinvigorating state control of education would enable states like Florida to serve better the needs of students, parents, and teachers," DeSantis, a Republican, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, touting the successes in his state coming from allowing more local control in education.
The governor noted that in Florida, his administration has pushed for student-focused and parent-friendly policies in education, taking on "bureaucratic overhang" from the Obama and Biden administrations.
"We abolished Common Core, which had been pushed by the Obama administration, because it didn't work for our students," DeSantis said. "Florida replaced it with high-quality, content-rich standards, Florida's Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or BEST, which outline the state's expectations at each grade level."
The governor added that in Florida, the state has ended "high-stakes" examinations, shifting the model to progress testing, resulting in significant year-over-year improvements.
The state has also, following action from conservative reformers, enacted universal school choice, which has eliminated financial responsibility restrictions and an enrollment camp on school choice scholarships.
As a result, Florida in 2024 had more than a half-million students who used a school choice scholarship that allowed them to participate in homeschooling or private schools, the governor said.
Charter school expansion has also been supported by the DeSantis administration, allowing the schools to enroll more than 400,000 Florida students. The governor said the population of students in the charter schools are low-income but still performs above peers in traditional districts.
The Heritage Foundation and the ALEC Index of State Education Freedom have ranked Florida as the No. 1 state for education freedom for several years in a row for these reasons, and U.S. News and World Report has ranked the state as being number one state in education for the past two years, DeSantis said.
"We also returned education to the core principles of teaching math, reading, history, and science," and eliminated DEI, expanded educational options, and made data-driven investments supporting positive outcomes, the governor said.
Such changes came while opposing the policies that were pushed by the Department of Education, including the Biden administration's attempt to deny Florida federal school lunch money because he signed a bill in 2021 on transgender participation in sports, DeSantis said.
"How ridiculous is it that the federal government would try to shoehorn states into jamming men into women's athletic competitions?" DeSantis said. "For decades, the federal government has tied more strings than ever imaginable to our federal education dollars for both secondary and postsecondary education."
Republicans have been calling for decades to end the department, back to 1981, when Ronald Reagan said that eliminating the department, then in its second year, would ensure that local needs were being met, DeSantis noted.
"Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education is a necessary step to unleash states to reach their full potential and copy the successful Florida model," he concluded. "President Trump will demonstrate leadership by following through on a four-decade-old Republican campaign promise. Then the states can get to work — and the prospects for student achievement will brighten."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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