Florida Leads the Nation in Destroying Public Education 📚

- Daily Kos, June 2, 2024. - Ed. - Photo: Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers' salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
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Six states have now passed universal school choice programs, but Florida has been singularly effective at accomplishing what Republicans have had near the top of their agenda for decades: destroying public education. As The Hill reports, public schools in Florida are shutting down in multiple districts due to a rapid loss of students.

Meanwhile, private school enrollment is up by more than 50,000 students, and charter schools have picked up 68,000. Homeschooling has increased by 58.6%, which would likely be even higher if parents weren’t competing for a limited number of available homeschool vouchers. Despite those vouchers expanding by 40,000 a year, they still can’t keep up with demand.

No other state has seen anything even close to this vast shift away from public education.

So why are Florida Republicans so successful in reducing public school enrollment?

Because they did their homework. They spent decades draining public school funding, making them poorly staffed, poorly run, and an overall miserable place to get an education. Then they created a voucher system that offers parents unmatched goodies for joining in the enterprise of keeping children ignorant while making right-wing “education” providers rich.. If that’s not enough, most private schools are Christian, so many of them propagate a conservative view of history and science that Republicans fully favor.

Of the parents who have pulled their kids from public schools for homeschooling, 91% describe themselves as Christians, and many popular homeschool curricula radically whitewash history, deny climate change and evolution, and are simply awful.. Fla. has imposed new history standards that require teachers to tell students that Black people benefited from slavery and that Black people are responsible for the Tulsa massacre. Some entire subjects have even been banned from Florida classrooms...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/2/2243954/-Florida-leads-the-nation-in-destroying-public-education