Division of Vocational Rehabilitation - 930 positions Division of Blind Services - 300 positions Annual operating budget for all entities in 2012-13 - approximately $18.6 billion Oversee 28 locally governed public state colleges and 47 school district technical centers The department supports 2.6 million students, 3,800 public schools and 318,000 full-time staff and more than 180,000 teachers.

A constitutional amendment in 1998 made effective January 2003 reorganized the office so its head was no longer elected and created a State Board of Education.

The department claimed that the books rejected "incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies", including critical race theory (CRT), social–emotional learning (SEL), and Common Core.

"[6] In May 2022, the state published records disclosing the results of the reviews, revealing that the majority of reviewers—largely educators—found no evidence of the textbooks containing CRT, but more often flagged for containing SEL.

Most of the accusations of prohibited content came from Chris Allen—a vice chair of a chapter of the conservative group Moms for Liberty—who accused textbooks of promoting CRT because of its inclusion of data surrounding an implicit bias test and a statement that the United States had not "eradicated poverty or racism", complained of a word problem that involved the gender pay gap, objected to an author "[talking] about a climate crisis as if it’s a proven fact".

[9] In completing this initiative, Florida joined roughly half of US states that currently have a financial literacy component to their public education curriculum.