NAPLES, Fla. – After Monday’s press conference, wherein Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced that Florida will mirror the federal government’s effort to eliminate waste and fraud in the state government, Florida Citizens Alliance, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to improving Florida’s K-12 education, is asking the governor to place a special emphasis on removing waste and fraud from the Department of Education (DOE) and especially the 67 School Districts as part of these efforts.
“As usual, Gov. DeSantis is ahead of the curve on implementing a statewide program, and we are grateful for his attentiveness to the issues that Floridians care about,” said CEO and Co-Founder of FLCA, Keith Flaugh. “With that said, we think that the k-12 education at all levels, which is 28% of Florida’s entire annual budget, is the obvious place to start with this new effort. The statistics on Florida’s spending on public schools, and the results achieved by that spending, do not lie. We are spending tens of billions of dollars on public education in our state, and frankly, our students are not performing very well.”
According to the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, also called the NAEP educational assessment, 73 percent of Florida’s K-12 students are not proficient in reading. In mathematics, 75 percent of Florida’s K-12 students are not proficient, and Florida ranks 46th in math and 47th in reading among all states.
When it comes to SAT scores, from the 2023-2024 school year, the latest year for which that data is available, Florida ranks 43rd among the 50 states. As for ACT scores, Florida ranks 39th in the country.
FLCA also noted that overall, the United States ranks below 30th in the world in education.
“So many school districts in Florida have an extremely high number of employees and huge budgets, but their students cannot read or do math at their current grade level,” said Flaugh.
He used Collier County as an example.
The Collier County School District has more than 7,000 employees for about 50,000 students. In that county, the education budget increased 12 percent to $1.66 billion. But according to US News and World Report data, only 58 percent of Collier County’s students are reading at their grade level, and 56 percent of the county’s students are doing math at their grade level.
The numbers, Flaugh says, are even worse in Lee County.
The Lee County School District has more than 12,000 employees for more than 90,000 students and a budget of $2.9 billion. However, only 44 percent of students read at their grade level, and only 29 percent of students do math at their grade level.
The Hillsborough County School District has more than 10,000 employees and about 225,000 students, along with a $2.4 billion budget. There, only 46 percent of students are reading at grade level, and only 41 percent of students are doing math at grade level.
“The federal DOGE effort in education is just beginning and there is a serious effort to eliminate the US Department of Education, but this will not save public education in Florida,” said Flaugh “State and local budgets need to be focused on academic results.”
Flaugh and FLCA say their goal is to see the education budget decreased by 30 percent with reading and math scores above 70 percent.
“We think there is enough waste in our education budget to cut it by at least 30 percent, which will help dismantle the bureaucracy that gets in the way of learning,” said Flaugh. “By slashing that bureaucracy and refocusing academic fundamentals, we are confident that test scores will rise, and that students in Florida won’t just become proficient, but will become advanced in critical subjects like math and reading.”
About Florida Citizens Alliance
Founded in 2013, Florida Citizens Alliance champions K-12 education reform in Florida. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, FLCA’s mission is to improve Florida’s K-12 education by uniting and empowering teachers, students, and parents. The three pillars of our mission are engaging local communities through our KIDS FIRST program, providing alternative education resources through our Microschool Initiative, and promoting legislative action.
