Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald who is expert at skewering Ron DeSantis and his hateful policies. When he tried to take a victory lap during the Republican debates, she called him out. Kids are not better off in Florida, she writes, but racists and homophobes are. It turns out that DeSantis’s war against gays, Black history, and drag queens was not enough to sustain his campaign.
Santiago wrote:
Only in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version of Fantasyland are kids in Florida “better off” under his watch.
The presidential job-seeker’s assertion, during Wednesday’s Iowa debate with Nikki Haley, that such is the state of childhood in Florida would be laughable — Exhibit No. 1, the man is trying to ruin happy-for-all Disney World — if his anti-science children’s healthcare policiesweren’t dangerous.
Or, his lie might have played out as the self-deprecating joke of a desperate, losing candidate — if DeSantis had kept his homophobia, transphobia, and discomfort with the legacy of racism in American history, where those sordid feelings belong, in the privacy of his home and wooden heart.
But DeSantis made his fears and prejudices against people who aren’t white, straight and ultra Christian-conservative the public’s business in Florida. And what he has unleashed isn’t child-friendly at all.
He used his power to get bills passed through the lily-livered Florida Legislature, signing into law medical practices that go against the advice of respected child healthcare experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This means doctors and psychiatrists in Florida are limited by law on what they can do to address our children’s gender issues, and subject to felony penalties if they deviate from GOP wishes. Doctors also have their hands tied treating mothers facing an unwanted pregnancy discovered after six weeks, which also adversely affects entire families.
And, because the anti-vaxxer governor is a friend of debunked science and quack medical opinions, he has not only campaigned against children (and adults) getting the COVID vaccine, but he’s made it difficult for Florida parents to access boosters.
Under his mandate, schools are no longer safe zones for gay and trans children.
Before DeSantis, the intersection of healthcare, identity and lifestyle was a matter between parents and their doctors. Decisions about approach and care were based on individual cases and made as a family unit.
Now, healthcare and education are in the hands of Republican ideologues — social engineers who constantly feed voters misinformation and outright lies, feeding people’s lowest human instincts to shun the reality and preferences of others.
In schools, children unable to speak to their parents about conflicting identity issues, often were able to confide in a teacher, who in consultation with supervisors, would decide if it warranted parental intervention, or if the disclosure might put the child’s life in danger from family.
No more.
Teachers can be sued, fined, and fired if they allow gender identity discussions, pushing some excellent teachers to leave Florida or the profession, worsening a teacher shortage. This isn’t good for anyone, but least of all for children.
Adults have the power of choice — and many Floridians are exercising it by moving with their trans or gay children out of state, driven by the anti-LGBTQ laws, like former Heat star Dwayne Wade, whose teenage daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020.
Parents aren’t going to run the risk of the state taking transgender minors away from their families for receiving gender-affirming care. Nor will they stand for the atmosphere of hate and disrespect DeSantis’ constant harangues and policies have generated.
Unfortunately, not all children have parents with the financial wherewithal to move them to a more sane and accepting state — and remain stuck in DeSantis World suffering his pathology, especially in schools, where they’re no longer free to be themselves.
Nor to read literature that reflects their reality. Nor to play sports in the team where they feel they belong.
No, children are definitely not better off in Florida, where the education system is under-performing, according to national assessments. DeSantis’ solution: Get rid of the tests and dissuade kids from going to college.
With no accountability and ways to measure, he can claim success. With kids skipping higher education, his wealthy donors can access cheaper labor.
The governor’s culture wars and their harmful effect, however, are catching up to him.
In the process of trying to convince Republican voters that he and his “Florida Blueprint” are the alternative to disgraced Donald Trump, DeSantis recast his record — the vengeful attack on Disney World and his ruthless approach to LGBTQ and transgender children — to paint a pretty picture depicting major successes.
Oh, and what a macho man he was to take on Disney!
“We took on Disney and we defeated that and we won that fight and our kids kids are better off now,” DeSantis said.
A big lie that he kept repeating. Disney continues to celebrate Pride Month with “Gay Days,” and in 2023 released its Disney Pride Collection of clothing and accessories….
His neatly-packaged arguments, an attempt to camouflage what’s clearly discrimination, fear of difference and assaults on free speech, are coming undone.
Voters do have the last word — and, apparently, no matter how much the governor travels the nation, or perhaps because they’re getting to know him — polls show voters just don’t pick him.
Even in Florida, where DeSantis thinks he’s king, voters prefer 91-count, criminally-charged Donald Trump.
Turns out the people better off in Florida are possibly a minority: homophobic, racist adults.
But definitely not our children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One correction: DeSantis promised to get rid of the tests, but he didn’t. He replaced one test ELA and one Math standardized test at the end of the year with THREE standardized tests in each subject throughout the year, in addition to other high-stakes tests still required by the state. And these are the same-old, same-old, just like the freaking Common Core tests and made by one of the companies, AIR, that churns those invalid tests out for other states. Same problems as with the tests they replaces, but MORE test-based micromanagement. See this:
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CX: He replaced one standardized test in ELA and one standardized test in Math, both given at the end of the year, with THREE standardized tests in each subject throughout the year
So, many more tests. That’s the opposite of “doing away” with them. And more test-based micromanagement of teachers as administrators look at the results of the invalid interim tests. To see why these tests do not validly measure what they purport to measure, see the link above on Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs). I got tired of writing and rewriting explanations of the many ways in which the federally mandated state standardized tests in ELA and, to a lesser extent, the ones in math, fail and why they do NOT provide accurate “data,” as is claimed by the test purveyors and naively believed by politicians and reporters and, alas, even by some people who fancy themselves educators. PLEASE read and share that essay. It blows a bunch of holes in the whole standards-and-testing “reform.” Anyone who takes these tests seriously and reports scores from them as though these were accurate measures of learning outcomes is deluded. He or she really needs to think a little more carefully. The tests are invalid, and the scores from them are therefore bs. In that piece, I explain precisely why. It’s time we stopped operating from pseudoscience and ended the federal testing mandate. Too bad Ron Ron didn’t have the courage to do that.
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cx: same problems as the tests they replace
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DeSantis’ tests are the same old bad wine in new bottles. These tests will be used against students, teachers and schools just the same.
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Even worse because now the same test is taken three times instead of once AND because it is given early in the year and because the administrators think that the results are actually valid, they can use these results to MICROMANAGE teaching. Well, you need to be spending your time doing exercises on these 28 “standards” your kids did badly on. TOTAL BS. WORSE than Common Core. A cursory glance at the BEST standards suggests that they are an improvement on the puerile Gates/Coleman Common Core, but the problem is with the whole idea of reducing an academic subject to a bunch of standards that are then tested. This encourages throwing out coherently planned curricula and pedagogy and instead doing exercises on the individual standards, with said exercises being modeled on the test questions. And because the tests are high stakes, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE DO. The changes in Florida encourage EVEN MORE of that sort of curriculum-destroying micromanagement of instruction.
SO, it’s worse than “welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.” It’s actually WORSE.
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Florida lets the governor get away with his lies and misinformation. Policy makers in the state crow about the 4th grade scores while the 8th grade and SAT scores are nothing special. Florida ranks among the top 10 states with the highest rates of uninsured children across the United States, with an estimated 332,000 children in that category. DeSantis refused to expand Medicaid and thousands of people have died as a result, but I doubt DeSantis loses any sleep over them.
At his’ core DeSantis is a bullish brute who only cares about winning and pushing his dystopian agenda. One current proposed bill is to place cameras in classrooms so the powers that be can fire people in real time. All his policies do is enhance inequity. Florida is not a great place for children, women, LBGT, immigrants or people of color. The governor’s policies mostly benefit straight white men.
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Florida is among the fifteen GOP led states that rejected receiving EBT (electroinic benefit transfer) money for families of free and reduced lunch children during the summer. The states include: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming
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Good article at The New Republic on the attacks on public schools from the right. Not news to any of us here, but sharable for those who are confused.
Lindsey Burke’s job is to do things such as, when testifying before a House Education Committee in April, proclaiming that we should abolish the Department of Education. Burke, an education policy program director at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, was responding to a question from Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman, after Burke had spoken in favor of “school choice.” Allowing parents to use public education funds to send their children to private schools—including religious schools—was, she argued, merely a way to enable families to “choose learning environments that are safe, and effective, and reflect their values.”
A bit later, Bowman attempted to cut through the obfuscating rhetoric. The former public school teacher and principal asked, “Do you support the Department of Education?” Burke leaned into her mic and answered without a beat, “No—dissolve it.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/177563/right-winning-war-schools
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