Florida
Beginning in January 2019, Florida’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, and the new commissioner of education, Richard Corcoran, brought a list of new education priorities to the state: improving curriculum; increasing choice options; expanding vocational and technical programs; ensuring that 80 percent of education funding is spent in classrooms; and reevaluating and revising education standards.
Florida’s work with the Region 7 Comprehensive Center focuses on three high leverage problems:
- Using implementation science to guide implementation of Florida’s new English language arts and mathematics standards, including building the capacity of educators at all levels of the system to understand and use the new standards;
- Building capacity to provide intensive support to school leadership teams in Florida’s Comprehensive Support and Improvement and Targeted Support and Improvement schools to directly impact the academic achievement of struggling students in these schools; and
- Supporting development of a scalable and sustainable system for Grades PK–3 literacy that ensures educators at all levels of the system understand and implement effective and equitable evidence-based literacy practices that include timely intervention to close student literacy performance gaps.