When it comes to education, America under President Trump increasingly looks a lot like Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Supreme Court is poised to allow parents to opt their children out of school lessons they oppose on religious grounds; in Florida, parents already have some opt-out rights.
The Trump administration has moved to withhold funding from schools and colleges with diversity practices it opposes, while pushing a “patriotic” curriculum.
Mr. DeSantis got there first.
Texas Republicans have created a gargantuan new private-school choice program, while Republican leaders in Congress have advanced a bill to allow federal dollars to pay for private-school tuition and home-schooling.
Florida has more children using vouchers than any other state in the nation.
Mr. Trump easily vanquished Mr. DeSantis in last year’s Republican primary, often belittling him along the way. But it is Mr. DeSantis who pioneered the education agenda that Mr. Trump and so many other conservatives have taken up with zeal.
Mr. Trump invited Mr. DeSantis to attend his signing ceremony in March for an executive order seeking to shutter the Department of Education. It was, perhaps, an indication of a détente between the men, and an acknowledgment of Mr. DeSantis’s leadership on education.
In a written statement, Harrison Fields, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said, “Many states, including Florida, are leading in this area, and they now have a partner in the Oval Office who prioritizes parents’ fundamental role in choosing what’s best for their children.”
A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis said the governor was not available for an interview.
DeSantis allies are also often fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump. So it can be awkward for them to speak openly about the inspiration the proud president appears to have taken from a former rival.
Some point out that it was Mr. Trump who began the so-called “war on woke” in 2020, with an executive order targeting liberal ideas about race.
“President Trump really opened up the culture war at the end of his first term,” said Christopher Rufo, a close ally of both men who shaped many of the ideas and strategies of the right-wing movement to eradicate diversity programs. “There’s a continuity.”
But that 2020 executive order focused on employee trainings, not schools. It was Mr. DeSantis who zeroed in on education, tapping into rising parent anger during the Covid-19 pandemic. He required Florida schools to offer in-person learning and swore to root out liberal ideas on race and gender from classrooms, signing a spate of laws and elevating these issues in the presidential campaign.
“Far be it for President Trump to be so foolish as to ignore a good idea,” said Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, the right-wing parental-rights group that was key in shaping Mr. DeSantis’s agenda in Florida.
But a comparison of the DeSantis and the Trump records also illustrates why, in many cases, it is easier to remake education from a state capitol than from Washington.
In higher education, Mr. Trump has tried a number of aggressive moves to push universities like Harvard and Columbia to eliminate diversity programs and put some left-leaning academic departments under outside oversight.
But American law provides few avenues for a president to control a college. Columbia has acquiesced to some federal demands. Harvard, on the other hand, is suing.
In Florida, by contrast, Mr. DeSantis targeted a small public liberal arts school, the New College of Florida, and was able to remake it in fairly short order. He appointed trustees who shut down diversity programs, abolished the gender studies department and recruited student-athletes. Some faculty fled.
Richard Corcoran, a close ally of Mr. DeSantis, became president of New College after serving as state education commissioner, where he had carried out the governor’s priorities in K-12 schools.
He noted that while previous Florida governors, like Jeb Bush, had also focused on education reform, Mr. DeSantis took conservative ideas about schools and colleges into “another whole stratosphere.”
The institutions Mr. DeSantis has focused on are public, easing his path. But Mr. Corcoran also noted that education policy is often locally driven.
“The local and state level is where liberal policy is passed and promulgated more than any other level,” he said, adding that he thought Mr. Trump still had an important role to play. “The president and Department of Education should use the power of the purse to clean that up.”
That is easier said than done. In K-12 education, the federal government provides less than 10 percent of the funding. Existing laws and statutes explicitly prevent federal agencies from dictating curriculum or teaching strategies.
States provide 90 percent of the funding for public schools, set learning standards and regulate the teaching profession.
Mr. DeSantis used those levers to make rapid change, which Florida educators, students and parents immediately felt.
In 2023, he signed a law making education savings accounts available to every Florida student regardless of family income. Taxpayer dollars can now fund private school tuition, for-profit virtual learning and home-schooling.
At the same time, Mr. DeSantis and his allies in the state legislature restricted how race, gender, sexuality and American history could be talked about in public schools.
Lessons on white privilege were banned, as were discussions of L.G.B.T.Q. identities in the early grades. Teachers of all subjects were offered $3,000 bonuses to attend trainings in a required new civics curriculum, which emphasized Constitutional originalism and the Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Educators could be fired for affirming a student’s transgender identity.
Even allies of Mr. Trump who praise his agenda acknowledge the barriers he faces. He is trying to reshape an education system that, in the United States, is designed to be locally controlled.
“I have been working with President Trump and helping with executive orders. But those things can be changed by another president,” said Ms. Justice, the Moms for Liberty founder.
She has recently left that group and is starting a new effort, based at the Heritage Foundation, which will push for state ballot initiatives.
“The action needs to happen at the state level,” she said.
There is still potential for significant action at the national level, however, just not in the executive branch.
The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, is considering or may soon take up a number of cases that could push elements of Mr. DeSantis’s agenda into more left-leaning states.
Last month, the court heard arguments in a case brought by Maryland parents, who wanted to opt their young children out of classroom readings of books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes, which they said violated their religious values. A lawyer for the parents, Eric S. Baxter, acknowledged that they were trying to set a precedent that would apply to parents who had religious objections to any school content, including in the upper grades.
Mr. Baxter argued that parents should be able to opt their children out of a high school biology lesson on evolution, for example. He also assured the justices that the right to opt out would not be a burden to schools because few parents would take advantage of it.
In Florida, however, schools say library opt-out and curriculum transparency laws have been burdensome because school staff members must catalog thousands of books and curriculum materials and post the details online. Some districts purchased special software to make the job easier.
Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, said the Maryland case could put even more extreme pressure on schools across the country than what happened in Florida.
If a school is “obligated to notify you on anything and everything,” he asked, “where does that end?”
Teachers’ unions and liberal groups have had only limited success in resisting Mr. DeSantis’s agenda in Florida. In the federal courts, liberal groups have had more luck fighting Mr. Trump’s efforts.
Last month, three judges temporarily halted enforcement of some elements of the president’s education agenda, saying the government had overstepped federal control over schools and colleges, and that attempts to ban D.E.I. efforts without clearly defining D.E.I. might violate free speech.
Those cases are proceeding, and some of these questions may eventually reach the Supreme Court, too.
Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.
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