Florida Students Fall Behind Rest Of Country As Republicans Focus On Culture Wars

Republicans in the state of Florida - led by Governor Ron DeSantis - have been focused on culture war stupid talk for years, and the impact that this is having on students in the state is glaringly obvious. According to the most recent national education assessment, Florida once again has the LARGEST "knowledge dropoff" for learning between 4th and 8th grade, meaning our students know LESS than their counterparts in literally every other state in the nation. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what is happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently the uh, uh, national assessment of educational progress for the United States came out. And once again, the State of Florida ranks dead last. And the amount of actual information that students are learning in this state. Now, I'm gonna get to the results in just a second, but before I do, let me make sure that everybody's very clear about what's happening here in the state of Florida. For many years now, we have watched as our Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has waged a war against public education here in the state. Whether it's making them not teach c r t, which wasn't a thing they were teaching to begin with, whether it's citing with the angry deranged parents who interrupt school board meetings, whether it's punishing school districts by withholding funding because they wanted the kids to wear masks so they didn't get sick and die during a pandemic.

Or whether it's transgender athletes just wanting to play sports, whatever it is, Ron DeSantis has been attacking, attacking, attacking teachers, professors, school boards and administrators in this state for years now, because it's gotten him a lot of culture war points. And while he's been doing this, while he's been attacking education test scores for Florida students have gone down, down, down, down and down, in fact, for the last 25 years, which by the way, actually coincides with how long Republicans have been in complete control of the state of Florida. Huh? Weird how that works out, right? But here's what's happening in these, uh, national, uh, association, uh, or national assessment of educational progress. And it's been happening, like I said, for two decades now. They're tracking students as they progress through school and they're doing this all over the country. And in the state of Florida around the time the kids hit about fourth grade.

What has been consistent in these n aeps is that the state of Florida starts dropping off from the national average, right? Like the average is the kids should know all of these things right here on a graph. But in Florida, in fourth grade, they know eh about there. And then when they're in fifth grade, it goes down from the average sixth grade, seventh grade, all the way to eighth grade, where it takes a significant drop off compared to every other state. Florida's dead last. We see the biggest learning drop off is what they call it between fourth and eighth grade. Here in this state where education is under attack, where we have had 25 years of solid Republican rule, our kids, our

Students are getting dumber as a result of that. And that's not an attack on the students. It's sure not an attack on the teachers. It's coming from the state level, from the Republicans who control this state. You are making our kids dumber, which probably works out well for you because if they weren't so stupid, they wouldn't be voting Republican, would they? Sorry, folks had to say it. But here's the thing. Because of these test scores getting worse and worse, again, Florida being at the bottom of all 50 states with this, with the learning dropoff, what Rhon DeSantis did starting this school year as a way to kind of fix the game, he changed the way we do those standardized testing here in the state of Florida.