DeSantis emphasizes parental rights and education change to homeschool parents.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently spoke to a crowd of homeschool parents in Orlando, recapping the best hits of his administration to an appreciative audience. At his first public speech since declaring his candidacy, the crowd frequently roared their approval.

Much of what DeSantis has done to fight what he typically calls “the woke agenda” is aimed at parents concerned about what their children are learning in school.

And this was a room full of people—more than 4,000, according to DeSantis’s office—who think schools are so out of whack they teach their kids at home.

DeSantis has done a lot to fight against the “woke agenda” in schools. He has reopened Florida’s schools early during the COVID pandemic, pulled sexually explicit materials off public school library shelves, and put the Constitution and civics back in the classroom. He has also increased school choice and support for homeschool families, and backed vocational education at college.

• Florida is ranked No. 1 in education by U.S. News and World Report.
• Ranked No. 1 in college affordability.

DeSantis has also cleaned house at the state’s New College, firing the president and installing a new board of conservative members charged with making the school a classical liberal arts college.

There’s his war with Disney, the state’s biggest private employer, with Disney World just outside Orlando. It was triggered by the company’s opposition to his signature Parental Rights in Education bill, but DeSantis has also made it about the company that once defined itself as “family friendly” beginning to sexualize its child-directed entertainment.

DeSantis has bolstered parents’ rights to advise and consent to what their children are being taught, restored age-appropriateness to what children are taught at various grades, and halted what he has begun calling “the pronoun Olympics” from public schools.

Parents at the Florida Parent Educators Homeschool Convention frequently erupted in cheers, going wild for lines like “gender ideology has no place in our education system.”

“Who would have thought the FBI would ever go after parents going to school board meetings? And yet that is happening and has happened,” DeSantis said, alluding to parents in Loudoun County, Va., tagged as domestic terrorists—and whose political reaction helped feed the upset victory of Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021.

DeSantis said Florida wants parents involved in their children’s education and “armed with the ability to make sure their kids are in a safe environment.”

“The political left, though, “make no mistake, they don’t want the parents involved in education, because they view you as an impediment to their ideological agenda. They view you as an impediment to their ability to indoctrinate kids with their beliefs and their agendas.”

Supporting the restoration of civics education to Florida classrooms, he said it was essential to teach about the republic’s foundations, its religious influences, and those of the English constitution, “all these important things that have become a lost art in modern American society.”

DeSantis tied together broad themes like education, the Framers’ intent in creating the Constitution, and what it takes to keep a democracy alive.

“What we’re doing is taking education into our own hands as Floridians, and you’re doing it as parents in the homeschool movement,” he said.

“We’re doing it in Tallahassee, as governor and our legislature, to say education is just something we’ve got to get right. You cannot have a society in which education just totally collapses into a lot of these side issues.”

“I always took for granted that we lived in a free country,” DeSantis said. “I never thought that there would honestly be a threat to freedom here.”

With the bureaucracy’s overreach during COVID-19 and the “weaponization” of agencies like the FBI, he said, “it’s really impressed upon me just how fragile freedom really is.”

“Our Founding Fathers understood this when they met in Philadelphia to frame the Constitution in 1787. They brought with them an intense study of the history of every republic that had ever been tried in the history of mankind.

“Their study showed them that there was only one thing that all of these experiments in republican forms of government had in common, throughout history, and i