Remember all the hysterics about Florida losing teachers because of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and his focus on eliminating social justice policies and courses from education? It turns out it was all overblown.
Florida saw an 8% decrease in teacher vacancies heading into the 2023-24 school year, according to the Florida Department of Education. That would bring Florida to an average of 1.28 vacancies per school, below the national average. Florida has focused on recruiting and retaining teachers and shortening the processing time for educator certificates.
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In all, Florida has 4,776 teacher vacancies. Yes, that is more than the roughly 2,200 the state had when DeSantis took office in 2019, but it is also worth noting that Florida’s population has been the fastest-growing in the country. From 2020 to 2022, Florida gained more than 655,000 people, which likely put a strain on schools trying to keep up with that growth. Again, Florida now has fewer vacancies per school than the national average. The frantic warnings about how the “war on woke” would run teachers out of the state were overblown.
On top of this, Florida students perform at or above the national average in reading and math at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Florida outperforms California on both subjects at both grade levels, with California’s math scores coming in below the national average. Florida outperforms New York on three of the four, with New York just topping Florida in eighth-grade reading, while its fourth-grade math scores are below the national average.
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On top of that, New York and California have seen declining public school enrollments despite that being a focus of the Democrats who run both states. New York and California are also two of the top three states people are leaving to move to Florida. Perhaps all those concerns about Florida’s schools would be better saved for the failing ones in the two largest Democratic states in the country.
This is another case disproving the narrative that DeSantis and conservative policies are destroying the state. As with the rest of the state, Florida’s schools are doing just fine and are certainly doing better than the Democratic models for the country in California and New York. The next doomsday narrative about Florida that comes true will be the first.