Governor of Florida, Ronald DeSantis, spoke at Marco Island Charter Middle School on December 5th, 2023, beginning at 9 am. The conference was initially called in order for DeSantis to discuss the budget for the 2024-2025 year, which was determined to be $114.4 billion, just over $2 billion less than in the previous year. 

During this conference, the Florida politician spoke heavily about many topics, specifically education and finance, and made several important comments regarding the well-being of both.

“We rank number one in education freedom.”- Ron DeSantis

This statement is a fairly vague one that can have a lot of different meanings, leading to different levels of validity. 

Education freedom can be defined as the ability of students and teachers to pursue knowledge without the threat of censorship, or retaliation for their studies.

Under this definition, Florida would be ranked far from first. According to U.S. News, Florida has the third most banned books of any state, behind only Texas and Virginia. This would make DeSantis’s statement false.

Florida also has several classes banned from being taught, such as AP Psychology for the reason of LGBTQ+ topics, and AP African American Studies. These class bannings would also go against the definition of education freedom.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization based out of Washington D.C., did recognize Florida as the number one state for educational freedom, which is likely what DeSantis was referencing in his speech. This is likely founded on heavy bias toward conservative states and politicians.

The Governor could have also been referring to freedom through school choice, which Florida is ranked highly in. School choice is a major part of DeSantis’s educational policies, so it would not be out of place for him to mention the progress he has made within the state regarding school choice.

“… number one public higher education system…”- Ron DeSantis

Florida is ranked by many as the state with the best overall public higher education system. This is no surprise with the state having some of the highest-ranked and most competitive public universities in the whole US like the University of Florida, which is ranked #5 nationally, and Florida State University, which is ranked #11 nationally.

These schools are ranked incredibly highly and are extremely well-regarded universities by many, including U.S. News, Forbes, and others. The students perform incredibly well in comparison to other schools, and the entrance requirements are much more stringent than in an average university.

With these higher scores, there are still a lot of limitations to what freedom there is in the schools due to Florida’s policies. Despite the limitations, these schools still do incredibly well compared to many.

“We have a higher credit rating than the US government does…”- Ron DeSantis

According to several sources, this grandiose statement made within the first minute of the speech is true. Credit rating is ranked on several scales, typically consisting of letters, with the highest rating being AAA on the Standard & Poor’s and Fitch scales, and Aaa on the Moody’s scale.

Looking at both on the S&P scale, Florida does have a higher rating than the US national government, with Florida having an AAA rating, and the US having an AA+. This would make this statement true according to this scale. On the Moody’s scale, both have the same AAA rating. 

This surprising instance of Florida having a higher credit rating by the federal government does have some reasons behind it. The U.S. government loses a lot of money trying to get bills and other acts passed. This can contribute to the lower credit score than the state of Florida.

“Now, we’ve also continued to do record investments in school safety and mental health.”- Ron DeSantis

Under the DeSantis administration, school safety has made a major improvement. With the now-required badges and the locked doors in many schools, Florida schools are now some of the safest they have ever been from a security standpoint.

First Lady Casey DeSantis has been making a push throughout the term for better mental health programs. While the overall mental health program should be improving, there is still heavy action against some of those who need mental health support the most, typically members of the LGBTQ+ community, from many of the GOP.

While there are record investments in these categories, the budgets for these have been borderline neglectful for many years. Even with the higher budgets, according to the United States Census Bureau, Florida still has some of the lowest spending per student in the nation.

DeSantis did announce the budgets that he had set out to announce at the conference and shed light on some other issues along the way. He announced early on that he would be cutting over 1,000 state government positions in order to make more resources available for the state.