Ron DeSantis is the real deal

Stanley Kurtz writes: “Ron DeSantis continues to win cultural battles that most Republicans preemptively abandon or, worse, don’t even know exist.” The best examples, Stanley continues, are in the vital field of education:

Over and above signing the widely discussed Parental Rights in Education bill, DeSantis vetoed an action-civics bill when few Republicans understood what action civics even was. He laid out a far-reaching program of higher-education reform when most Republican governors avoid the subject. And he went after the higher-education establishment’s politicized abuse of accreditation agencies, provoking pushback from the Biden administration. (There was little to be gained politically by taking on the obscure but crucial issue of accreditation, yet DeSantis did it anyway.)

Remarkably, however, what may be DeSantis’s most important education achievement is still barely known, although it’s two years old.

This achievement is the effective repeal and replacement of Common Core. Stanley explains:

This was not the deceptive rebranding undertaken by many governors after the public soured on Common Core. No, DeSantis created genuinely new, high-quality reading and math standards, and they are now arguably the best such standards in the country.

DeSantis’s rigorous math standards shed the lax and “fuzzy” new-age approach favored by Common Core, while his reading standards restored classic literature to its proper place at the center of the English curriculum (while giving local school districts plenty of scope to fill in the details).

Stanley elaborates on the virtues of the way Florida teaches English:

The wonderful thing about Florida’s new English standards is the way they restore classic literature to its rightful place in the curriculum. The education Left wants to ditch substantive “knowledge” (about authors like Shakespeare or Austen, or about literary periods like the classical era or the Renaissance) in favor of a focus on “skills.” The delusion here is that knowledge and skills can be separated.

In practice, the focus on skills simply serves as an excuse to scrap the great works of Western literature. The seemingly bland and apolitical jargon of “skills” is also manipulated to inject leftist politics into the classroom.

Florida’s English standards reject this approach, emphasizing instead universal themes explored by great literature across a wide variety of periods.

Stanley contrasts DeSantis’ treatment of common core with that of Brian Kemp, governor of neighboring Georgia:

We see the problem in Georgia, where newly revised English standards not only fail to break decisively with Common Core, but purge great literature even more thoroughly than it was purged before. Georgia’s lamentable draft English standards are all the more troubling. . . .

Classic literature is nowhere to be found in Georgia’s draft English standards. Instead, Georgia encourages students to identify the effects of social and historical influences on the biases of a given author. These may be useful “skills,” yet by emphasizing them exclusively — and in the absence of great literature that explores universal human themes — Georgia’s approach cultivates a shallow reductionism that prompts students to dismiss the great literary works as dated.

Stanley doesn’t single out Kemp except for illustrative purposes. In fact, he credits the governor for various aspects of Georgia education policy, notably his role in the passage of a strong anti-CRT bill during this past year’s legislative session.

Nor is Kemp the only Republican governor to come up short on key education issues. Others, in states “redder” than Georgia, have failed to take on the left-wing education establishment. This includes some who, unlike Kemp, are considered conservative heroes.

Stanley drives home the point:

Republican governors and state education superintendents notwithstanding, even in red states, education bureaucracies are run by the Left. Sadly, Republican officeholders generally allow woke education bureaucrats to have their way.

Sometimes, Republicans get fooled because they aren’t up to speed on the bureaucracy’s latest intellectual fashions, obscure jargon, and strategic deceptions. In other cases, GOP officials simply surrender, fearing a high-profile battle on unfamiliar terrain, with the media against them.

DeSantis proves that all this can be reversed, but are Republicans in other states prepared to follow his lead? If not, we’ll lose the culture no matter how many elections we win.

Stanley devotes huge amounts of time to working with conservative state legislators, GOP governors, and their staffs to combat the woke left and the education bureaucracies it controls. Accordingly, I give great weight to his verdict on DeSantis and his administration.

That verdict is this:

DeSantis is the real deal. He knows what to fight for, and wins cultural battles before others are even out of the blocks. I have a hard time keeping up with him.

Isn’t this just the kind of public official America needs in the White House?