Ron DeSantis: Schools Have Been ‘Taken Over By Ideology’; We Want Teachers with Real World Experience

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday explained the issues with teacher recruitment, explaining that many individuals have been “overtaken by ideology” at “certain schools of education,” which is turning a lot of people off.

DeSantis, who announced a series of teacher recruitment initiatives on Tuesday, noted that many schools are failing those who aspire to be teachers, as they have been taken over by ideological agendas in this day and age.

“I think what you do is you get people that have proficiency in core academic disciplines and then you have them go in. But trying to teach them at like, certain schools of education, I think that’s been overtaken by ideology and so I think that’s a turn off for a lot of people,” he explained.

“Because at the end of the day, I think most people that would want to get into it, they want to get into it and they want to be there and they want to be helping students, they don’t want to be kind of a cog in some indoctrination machine,” he said, explaining that his administration is prioritizing rooting out indoctrination in Sunshine State schools.

“In Florida, our mantra has been, our schools are to educate kids, not indoctrinate kids,” he said:

Hopefully what we’re doing is saying that, you know, teaching is not about learning quote ‘education’ in college or university, you know. It’s really about having proficiency in subjects and then learning on the ground about how to do it, and the thing is that you can have people that do well in like a college course, some of them — they get in front of the classroom and they just … they’re not up to snuff. There’s other people that may have had as high a grade point average and university courses, but they have real energy and they connect with the students and they just do a really good job. And so that is something that I think you can’t really judge on an academic transcript.

“But certainly we would prefer people with real world experience and academic proficiency in the core subjects they’re teaching — English, math, science, not saying, ‘Oh I’ve got a — I went to the school of education somewhere and they taught me kind of how to teach.’ Because, you know, I’ve seen that and I’ve been very underwhelmed by it,” DeSantis added, deeming that approach a “magnet for a lot of ideology.”

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