In 2020, Ron DeSantis’s administration declared him the “Education Governor” for how eager he was to dramatically change the state’s education system. Three years later, he’s provoked — and been engulfed in — an ongoing list of education controversies as part of his fight against “woke ideology,” or schools acknowledging or teaching about systemic injustice in American society.
As DeSantis prepares to announce his campaign for the presidency, as many have speculated, he has ramped up his involvement in Florida schools. Not only is he doubling down on existing legislation, he’s also introducing new rules and regulations — and making sure the Education Department follows through. While he largely focused on K-12 in the early years of his term, this year he has launched new plans to remake higher education. In January, DeSantis unveiled an aggressive higher education proposal, and in late February the Florida House followed the announcement by introducing HB 999, a bill that outlines specific changes to how public postsecondary educational institutions operate. If adopted, the legislation would take effect on July 1, 2023.
Before this year, DeSantis had already signed a bill to ban transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ public school teams and banned more than 40 percent of math textbooks that publishers submitted for review, which he said contained “woke” ideology.
He passed the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act that took effect in July 2022, which he called an effort to give parents more control over what their children learn at school but which critics called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill for how it bans talk about sexuality and gender in grades K-3. In April, the state’s Board of Education took it a step further by expanding the ban to cover grades 4-12 too, after DeSantis’s administration proposed the change in March. He endorsed more than a dozen candidates for school board in 2022 and spent more than $2…
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