Ron DeSantis is fleshing out what his educational policy would look like if he’s elected to lead the nation later this year.
One proposed innovation: a nationalized standard for the teaching of history and social studies.
“I think we will create a model curriculum for American civics,” he said during an interview on Iowa’s KCCI.
“We’ve done that in Florida. It’s really taken off. We’ve provided training courses for teachers where they can get a $3,000 bonus. So that’s really a model, I think because we’ve got to teach people about what it means to be an American. We’ve got to teach them about the founding principles of this country. So we will absolutely be leading on that,” he added during the Tuesday broadcast.
The Governor first rolled out civics education innovations during the pandemic, with 2021’s Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative: an ambitious proposal to use $116 million in federal coronavirus relief funds to ramp up civics education.
The one-time money from the CARES Act funded Elementary and Secondary School Relief Fund was intended to make Florida “the national leader in civics education” and “get politicization out of the curriculum.”
The effort targeted so-called “indoctrination factories” and “critical race theory,” and the Governor noted the feds were paying for it.
“We got this money dumped,” DeSantis noted, describing the pandemic allocations. “I could have just spent it and said it was emergency spending.”
During Tuesday’s interview, DeSantis reiterated his desire to eliminate the federal Department of Education, saying that he didn’t expect federal legislation that determined curriculum standards that would potentially expand Florida’s approach to objectionable materials to be expanded nationwide, as it “wouldn’t work well for this country.”
But even though Americans may not see eye to eye on what constitutes obscenity or prurience, the Governor bets that even without a Department of Education, people would appreciate civics guidance from his future presidential administration.
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