Gov. DeSantis praises Florida’s selective civics, history education as exam scores rise

Ron DeSantis' campaign gets a nice bump, courtesy of Florida taxpayers.

Gov. Ron DeSantis Thursday announced that Florida’s civics and history education scores have risen significantly since he put an emphasis on it in schools and began cracking down on versions he calls “distorted.”

At Crooms Academy of Information Technology, a magnet school in Sanford, DeSantis and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz laid out results of 2022 school civics literacy and history exams that showed a 5-point increase from the previous year, to a passing rate of almost 70%. Students’ passing rate in history went up by 2 points.

The improvements, the Governor and Commissioner said, were across the board and in key student demographic groups, including those who are economically disadvantaged and those with learning disabilities.

“That’s not nearly good enough. That’s much better, I would say, than most people would expect, and certainly much better than probably what you would get in most parts of the country,” DeSantis said.

He and Diaz credited the improvements to his programs and legislation he signed in 2021 to overhaul civics education and require civics literacy exams, to encourage civics debate teams in high schools, and to reward teachers with bonuses for getting civics education training.

Surrounded by books in the Crooms Academy library, including some displaying potentially subversive messages, DeSantis also reminded the gathering that he also has pushed for restrictions on what kinds of influences students may exposed to in school books, seeking to ban anything deemed “woke,” including math textbooks.

“We’re also unabashedly promoting civics and history that’s accurate and is not trying to push an ideological agenda,” DeSantis said. “I think what we have seen in different parts of the country is they have tried to distort history as a way to pursue an agenda.”

Critics have contended that DeSantis has tried to sanitize public education from teaching darker aspects of social history. But he has insisted, and reiterated Thursday in Sanford, that it’s about others trying to distort history, not him.

“We are learning the real history. You’re learning the real facts, that’s not going to be done in a way that’s trying to indoctrinate students with whatever modern agenda that somebody may have.”