Signing bills that will shake up public education’s status quo, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his supporting cast repeatedly cited the state’s “No. 1 in education” ranking via U.S. News & World Report.
Not a lot of people wanted to report on the honorific, the Governor griped.
“Because, you know, they didn’t like the narrative on that,” DeSantis said. “But the reality is, we were No. 1 on that.”
Really, though, that ranking wasn’t quite apropos to the PreK-12 topics being addressed Tuesday at the bill signing in Miami. When that No. 1 overall education ranking is broken into components, the magazine put the state at No. 14 in PreK-12 education and No. 1 in higher education.
The Governor was there to sign bills limiting School Board terms, ending automatic union deductions from employee paychecks for union dues, broadening paths to teacher certification and restricting students’ social media access during the school day.
Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. also cited the U.S. News & World Report ranking.
“That is thanks to the bold leadership of our education Gov. Ron DeSantis,” Diaz said, prompting applause throughout the room at the True North Classical Academy location serving grades 6-12. “Regardless of what the narrative is, regardless of what they say, this Governor is going to do right … to make sure he’s putting our students first, our teachers first and our parents first.”
The U.S. News report came with an outline of what characteristics were weighted to rank the states in education and none of them mention much about COVID-19 masking and book challenges, both of which the Governor discussed Tuesday in addition to the state’s testing results in the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
For higher education, factors weighted in the magazine’s rankings were two- and four-year graduation rates, debt at graduation, tuition and fees and population with an advanced degree.
For Prek-12 education, factors weighted in the rankings were college readiness as measured by the SAT, the ACT, or both, high school graduation rates, and math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
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