PENSACOLA, Fla. — Governor Ron DeSantis is celebrating improved numbers from the state’s Department of Education.<\/p>\n
The numbers show more students are showing improvement in the classroom as Florida is spending a record amount of money on its education system.<\/p>\n
“For the first time ever, more than 60 percent of Florida students at or above grade level in both English, language arts and in math,” DeSantis said.<\/p>\n
The governor cited his changes to the state’s assessments as one of the reasons for the improvement.<\/p>\n
He got rid of the one end-of-year assessment and replaced it with three progress exams taken by students throughout the year.<\/p>\n
“Rather than do one high stakes end-of-the-year test, we could do periodic assessments throughout the year and we can call that progress monitoring,” DeSantis said. “It’s less about a high stakes, ‘have you crammed enough to do the test?’ and more about a more accurate assessment about how these students are progressing throughout the school year.”<\/p>\n
The governor also announced additional funding to help raise teacher salaries across the state.<\/p>\n
Florida is setting aside more than $1.5 billion to improve teacher salaries.<\/p>\n
DeSantis is hoping this money will help boost Florida’s minimum teacher salary from $39,000 per year to $50,000 per year.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘look if we’re going to do this, I want it to go into their pockets,'” he said. “In order to recruit new teachers, you need to have better salaries than where we were at.”<\/p>\n
The governor’s address comes after the Network for Public Education ranked Florida last in support for K-12 public schools.<\/p>\n
The report criticized Florida for sending billions of dollars to support private schools and its low teacher pay.<\/p>\n
Governor DeSantis says his policy changes in education have improved Florida’s education system.<\/p>\n
“I think this innovation was the right way to go,” he said. “I believed in it, it made sense. I thought it would be good for students and now we’re seeing this is really paying off.”<\/p>\n
Escambia County schools superintendent Keith Leonard says the state’s progress monitoring exams have been successful. He adds this year’s allotment for teacher pay raises will help with staff retention.<\/p>\n
“Personally, anything that helps increase the salary of our teachers, we are appreciative of,” Leonard said. “Cost of living is going up — whether that’s groceries, gas, affordable homes. It’s not getting less expensive, it’s only costing us more.”<\/p>\n
DeSantis is set to sign the state budget with those teacher pay raises on July 1.<\/p>\n
The state is also setting aside an additional $200 million for teachers who have worked for more than 10 years.<\/p>\n
DeSantis added school districts can opt to supplement the state’s teacher pay raise funding with their own funding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PENSACOLA, Fla. — Governor Ron DeSantis is celebrating improved numbers from the state’s Department of Education. The numbers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-321541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}