According to DeSantis - The Numbers Don't Lie. But According to the grades? Someone is.

Governor DeSantis opened the school year with a press conference at Tortuga Preserve Elementary in Lehigh Acres, announced a record 92.2 percent Florida graduation rate, and closed his remarks by saying the numbers do not lie. But according to our sources? Omission might.

By Amber Cebull and Ali Olivo · August 8, 2026

On Wednesday the Governor of Florida came to Lehigh Acres and opened the school year at Tortuga Preserve Elementary. Twenty-eight minutes into his remarks, wrapping up, he said this about the people who work in Florida schools.

And what I'll say is it's it's been a job well done. Those numbers don't lie. You you've seen the improvement. We got a lot of momentum and we want to continue it forward.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tortuga Preserve Elementary, Lehigh Acres, August 6, 2026, at 27:55

Now go back to minute two. Before the list, before any of it, this is how he introduced the rankings he was about to read.

You know, there's various ways that people rank different stuff and you know, you take it with the grain of salt but at the same time we can say that we have been ranked number one in education freedom four consecutive years.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, same remarks, at 1:49

So here is the question, since he is the one who set the standard. Is that how you have told your districts to approach their grading systems as well? Ranking different things, taking it with a grain of salt?

Because that is a fair description of what a 50 percent floor does to a stack of student work. It ranks different things the same. The difference is that the Governor said the words out loud from a podium, and the parent reading a report card in October was never told to take anything with a grain of anything.

Here is everything the three of them put in front of that room, compressed. The Governor: number one in education freedom, parent power, public higher education and workforce education, 76 percent of Florida schools now graded A or B against 71 percent last year, a record 92.2 percent graduation rate, and for the first time more than 60 percent of students at or above grade level in reading and math, up from 49 and 53 in 2023. The Superintendent: 752 district points and the best year in a decade, no D or F schools, an 89.8 percent graduation rate, and the elementary school they were all standing in moved from a D to a B.

The new Education Commissioner, four days into the job, talked about apprenticeships.

Every one of those is checkable, and most of them check out. So we dug into our own numbers, the four nobody brought.

He was right the first time

The grain of salt belonged on the rankings, and he knew it. Heritage and the Center for Education Reform score states largely on how much school choice policy they have passed. Florida ranks number one because those groups are grading the policy Florida chose. It is a scoreboard the state helped build, and being first on it tells you what Florida decided to do, not how well its children read.

There is one more thing buried in that list of number ones. Between the education rankings, he said this: "We are also number one on Lightcast 2025 talent attraction scorecard and that's the third straight year we've been number one on that metric."

Lightcast is a labor market analytics firm. Its talent attraction scorecard is a business metric, the kind of number a state puts in front of employers deciding where to build. He read it out in the middle of a list about how Florida's children are doing, at an elementary school, to a room of educators, and nobody flinched.

School performance numbers are not only a report to parents in this state. They are a sales figure. They are part of what gets shown to companies weighing a move to Florida, which is a reason to want them high that has nothing to do with whether a fourth grader can read.

That is why Forbes was interested in spending an hour webcasting a DeSantis press conference at a seemingly random Lehigh Acres elementary school.

I think our friends in Alva, Lehigh, Buckingham and Gateway should probably be prepared to keep fighting for that land. Because I believe Forbes and DeSantis and many of our local politicians might have other plans for your rural paradise.

So the rankings are the least interesting numbers he brought, and he said so himself. The two that matter were sitting in the same paragraph and were never put next to each other.

Graduating and reading at grade level are not the same number

A record 92.2 percent of Florida students graduate. And for the first time ever, more than 60 percent perform at or above grade level in reading and math.

Read that again as a parent instead of as a press release. Ninety-two out of a hundred get a diploma. Sixty out of a hundred can do the work at their grade level. Both figures were announced in the same breath as one piece of good news, and nobody on that stage put them next to each other, so we did. Thirty-two points sit between finishing and being able to do the work. Same schools, same year, the same children moving through them, measured two different ways: graduation on a four year cohort, grade level on the students tested that year. If ninety-two out of a hundred walk out with a diploma and sixty out of a hundred are working at grade level, how much of the workforce coming out of our schools is already behind?

In Lee County the same two numbers, from the state's own school grade calculation, are further apart than that.

• Graduation Rate component: 90 points.
• English Language Arts Achievement: 56 points.
• Mathematics Achievement: 56 points.

Ninety percent graduate. Fifty-six percent read at grade level. A thirty-four point gap between finishing and being able to do it.

Every district in Florida has this gap

I pulled the state's district grade file for all sixty-seven districts and did the subtraction on every one of them. The median Florida district has a thirty-one point gap between its graduation rate and its reading achievement. Lee's thirty-four ranks twenty-first. It is barely above average.

So this is not a story about one district cutting corners. Florida has built a diploma that means something different from proficiency, in every county, and the gap is now so normalized that a governor can celebrate both halves of it in one sentence and no one in the room blinks.

The 92.2 percent is the number that goes on the stage. The 60 percent is the number that shows up when the kid gets to college, or to a job, or to a placement test.

Florida is grading its own test

You might be wondering how state assessment tests factor in.

FAST is Florida's own test. It replaced the FSA in 2022-23, which means the 2023 baseline everyone measures against is the first administration of a brand new assessment. When the state says reading went from 49 to 61, it is Florida grading Florida on a test Florida wrote, against a starting line Florida set three years ago.

There is exactly one external check, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which every state takes and no state controls. Here is what it said in 2024.

• Fourth grade math: Florida second in the nation, behind only Massachusetts.
• Fourth grade reading: Florida tenth, and yet the score itself fell to its lowest level since 2003.
• Eighth grade reading: 44th in the nation, below the national average, with no significant improvement since 1998.
• Eighth grade math: 41st in the nation, and worse than Florida's own 2003 result.

Florida's fourth graders are among the best in America. The same state's eighth graders are in the bottom ten. Whatever is working in third grade is gone by middle school, and the state test does not show it because the state test says everything is going up.

That is what I mean when I say real numbers from a system that changed what it measures. Nobody faked FAST. Florida just stopped checking its own work against anybody else's ruler.

Ask who this report card was written for

Go back through what got airtime that afternoon and sort it by who would want to hear it.

• Number one in workforce education, hit five years ahead of the 2030 goal.
• Number one on the Lightcast talent attraction scorecard, three years running.
• Number one in public higher education.
• Apprentices out-earning comparable degree holders by $15,000 to $21,000 a year.
• The superintendent noting that most of her students are choosing career and technical education.

Those are labor supply numbers. Workforce pool numbers. Every one of them answers the same question, and the question is not whether your child can read. It is whether a company that moves here will find people to hire.

As someone who does reputation management for a living? I know what damage control looks like when I see it.

The new Education Commissioner introduced himself the same way. Four days into running Florida's schools, he described where he came from: assistant secretary for labor in Washington, "overseeing all employment, training, talent development, and unemployment insurance systems for the nation." The state's top education official arrived from the Department of Labor, and the metrics on the stage were labor metrics.

Forty-fourth in the nation in eighth grade reading. Forty-first in eighth grade math. No significant improvement in eighth grade reading since 1998. Not one of those crossed the podium.

A parent needs the second metrics. A company choosing a state will look at the first.

I keep thinking about the employer on the other end of that pitch. If I were the one deciding where to build, I would hate to be lured to this state under false pretenses, on an inadequate picture of what the labor pool really looks like and how well that labor pool reads. Sixty percent at grade level is a hiring number. Forty-fourth in the nation in eighth grade reading is a hiring number. Neither one crossed the podium.

When Florida has paid a company to come here, the refunds arrive only after the jobs and the wages are verified, and the company owes the money back if it falls short. There is no matching clause on the state side of the table. Nothing anyone signs entitles an employer to an accurate picture of how well the workforce it is recruiting can read, and there is no version of this where the employer gets anything back. The number gets to be a sales figure with none of the obligations that come with selling something.

That is what the grades seem to be for now. Not a report to families about how their children are doing, but a recruitment number, a figure that goes in a pitch deck alongside no state income tax. Which is a reason to want the number high that has nothing at all to do with whether a fourth grader can read, and it explains why a district would rather deny a grading floor than explain one.

Florida already admitted the grades are inflating

Florida law has a tripwire in it. When more than 3 out of 4 schools of one kind earn an A or a B, the grading scale for that kind gets harder on its own. The Legislature wrote that rule because a bar everybody clears has stopped measuring anything.

This year it went off. An A at a high school now takes 65 percent of the points. Last year it took less.

The number that set it off is the one the Governor read from the podium: 76 percent of Florida schools graded A or B, up from 71. He announced the inflation and its automatic correction in the same breath, as one piece of good news, and left out the second half. Florida's own system looked at those results and decided its scale had gotten too easy.

Where the diploma number can move on its own

A Florida high school's grade is built out of ten components, each worth up to 100 points. Eight of them are test results: reading, math, science, social studies, and learning gains. Two of them are not tests at all.

• Graduation Rate. Did the student earn a standard diploma in four years, which means did they pass their courses.
• College and Career Acceleration. In the state's own words, a C-minus or better in an approved dual enrollment course, or an industry certification.

Twenty percent of a high school's grade rests on course grades and credentials rather than on test scores. That is the surface a grading floor touches. It cannot reach the other eighty percent, and it does not need to.

Which brings us to a district that is telling reporters a 50 percent grading floor is categorically false while its own assessments arrive with the scoring scale printed on them.

The mechanics of that floor: Fifty Percent for Existing: what a lowest grade of 50 does to a student average, and to the two components of a school grade that are not tests

Read next: The floor the district says does not exist, and the documents that say it does

What Lee's 37 points were actually made of

Carlin's 752 is real. It went up 37 points from 715, and it is the best number this district has posted in ten years. I went and got the state's component file to see where those 37 points came from.

• Science achievement: up 10.
• Middle school acceleration: up 8.
• ELA achievement and graduation rate: up 4 each.
• Grade 3 ELA, ELA learning gains, social studies: up 3 each.
• Math achievement and math learning gains: up 2 each.
• College and Career Acceleration: unchanged at 67.
• Math learning gains for the lowest performing 25 percent of students: DOWN 3.

Two of those never get said at a press conference.

The College and Career Acceleration component did not move at all, in the same year this district drove industry certification testing up 56 percent. They ran the push and the component sat still.

And the only component that went backwards is the one that measures whether the weakest math students in Lee County are learning anything. Down three points. Those are the exact children a grading floor is defended as protecting, and they are the only group in the district that lost ground in its best year in a decade.

The comparison nobody made

One more number, since we are doing numbers. Against the other sixty-six districts in Florida, Lee County ranks 43rd in reading achievement, 49th in math achievement, 43rd in graduation rate, and 41st in college and career acceleration.

Below the state median on every single component. Highest point total in a decade, and below average on everything that makes up the total. Every one of those is true, and only the first got said in Lehigh Acres.

Two other districts were in the room

In his opening the Governor thanked the school board members who had come: Lee County, and then Hendry and DeSoto. Two neighboring districts sat in the audience of a press conference about how well the host was doing. So I pulled their numbers too.

Hendry County scored 754 district points this year. Lee scored 752.

Hendry is a fraction of Lee's size, considerably poorer, and it finished a hair ahead of the district being congratulated. Now look at how each of them got there. Hendry's graduation rate is 82 percent. Lee's is 89.8. Hendry graduates almost eight percent fewer of its students and still came out with the same score, because it beat Lee on the tests: math achievement 58 to 56, math learning gains 58 to 56, and gains for the lowest performing quarter of math students 57 to Lee's 48.

Two districts, the same total, built out of different parts. One earned its points on what students could demonstrate. The other earned more of its points on how many students finished.

Then there is DeSoto. While Lee gained 37 points and Hendry gained 36, DeSoto County lost 28, falling from 658 to 630. Its graduation rate is 77.8 percent, the lowest in Southwest Florida, and it has moved less than three points in four years. Nobody on that stage mentioned it. If you were a DeSoto parent watching, you would have come away believing your schools were part of a statewide success story.

And then there is the district next door

Collier County is an A. It scored 872 points to Lee's 752, reads at 69 against Lee's 56, does math at 75 against Lee's 56, and graduates 94.4 percent of its students.

Collier's distance between its graduation rate and its reading achievement is 25 points, which ranks 59th out of 67 districts in Florida. Only eight districts in this state have a tighter fit between handing a student a diploma and that student being able to read at grade level. Lee's distance is 34, the twenty-first widest in Florida.

Thirty minutes south on I-75, the diploma means more. That is not a mystery about funding or demographics alone. It is a measurable difference in what the piece of paper certifies.

The number Lee moved fastest

One last comparison, from the state's own graduation file. Over the last four years Florida's graduation rate rose 4.9 points, from 87.3 to 92.2. Over those same four years Lee County's rose 7.3 points, from 82.5 to 89.8, the largest four-year gain of any district in this region. This past year alone Lee moved 4 points while the state moved 2.5.

Lee County is graduating students faster than Florida is. And Lee County ranks 43rd out of 67 districts in reading achievement, 49th in math, and below the state median on every single component of its own school grade.

Those two facts belong on the same page, and on August 6 only one of them made it onto the stage.

There is a version of this event I would have applauded. A superintendent says we went up 37 points, here is where every one of them came from, here is the one that went down and here is what we are doing about it, and here is the gap between our diploma and our reading scores because you deserve to know it. Nobody would have lost anything. The 752 would still be real.

Instead the good numbers went on the stage and the rest of them are sitting in a spreadsheet on the state's website that I had to go download.

They are selectively showing you parts of the picture. And one of those parts tells me they are prioritizing industry and development over our children. But that is just my opinion. I will let you make yours, with this available information they did not share with you.

Early voting is open right now, every day through Saturday, August 15, and Election Day is August 18. You get to decide who is standing on that stage next year. And any of them funded by developers? Probably tells you something.

See for yourself: The 2026 Money Map: every race on your ballot, and who is funding it

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