Florida schools’ Man(ny) of the hour

The best response to news that Gov. Ron DeSantis has chosen state Sen. Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah, as Florida’s new education commissioner is the old idiom: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”

We are entering what may be the most important moment in the history of Florida’s public education system. Recent controversies about school closures, student masking and politicized curricula have generated headlines and debate. But those issues must be considered in the broader context of stagnancy and even failure in students’ educational attainment around the country and in Florida, too.

Our schools are, happily, better than the abysmal national average. But the fact that fewer than half of Florida’s students are learning at grade proficiency has created unprecedented public openness to reform.

A national survey earlier this year found that 72% of Americans support school choice — eight points higher than at the beginning of the pandemic.

Accountability, transparency, choice — all of them are suddenly on the table in ways they never quite were before COVID revealed to parents the breadth and depth of the problems in our schools today.

This is the moment education reformers have been working toward for decades. It’s a moment that demands action, but deserves thoughtful, substantive action on behalf of children and parents — not a partisan food fight.

Enter Manny Diaz: teacher, reformer, leader.

His name has been synonymous with education reform since he was first elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2012. Since then, he has been an advocate for change in the educational system and has never slowed down.

In 2014, Diaz sponsored a suite of reforms to expand access to digital learning and modernize the state’s testing procedures to save taxpayer money. In 2016, three bills he wrote were passed into law: one expanding school choice, charter schools, and college-prep programs; another creating flexibility for teacher certification; and a third creating the state’s highly successful Principal Autonomy Program. In 2017, he spearheaded the effort to create the state’s Schools of Hope Scholarship Program, the most important reform to Florida schools in a generation.

In 2018, now as a member of the Florida Senate, Diaz led the effort to expand school choice scholarships for children who are bullied, for students falling behind in reading, and to begin introducing financial accountability on the state’s teachers unions. He was a prime mover behind legislation to equalize funding ratios for charter schools, modernize the state’s special education programs, and — just this year — update our statewide assessments.

These are not just tweaks, or political “messaging bills.” For a decade now, Diaz has been in the middle of every major bipartisan education reform passed into law. And they’re just the ones Diaz pulled over the finish line. He has also been a policy entrepreneur in the House and the Senate, working with both sides of the aisle to keep Florida’s schools moving forward and focused on their primary duty: the kids.

With Diaz as education commissioner, working with reformers in both parties and both houses of the Legislature, and a generation of parents extremely motivated to build out new, flexible educational choices for all, we could see a renaissance in Florida’s education system in the next few years.

Diaz has the knowledge and experience of a career educator and consensus-building legislator and the vision and courage to lead. Transparency and choice, charters and magnets, vocational schools and specialized schools — all delivering more accountability to parents and taxpayers, and more benefits to students, especially the poor and minority communities let down for so long by the status quo.

We have a chance to make Florida’s schools the standard of the country — and the world. The time is ripe, and the politics, policy and personnel are aligning as never before. Cometh the hour, cometh the Manny.

Skylar Zander is state director of Americans for Prosperity-Florida.