Teachers’ union allies predicted the law would lead to the destruction of the public-education system.
When Florida Republicans moved to drastically expand the state’s school-choice programs earlier this year, progressives predicted nothing less than the destruction of the state’s public-education system. By lifting income requirements and taking other steps to ensure Floridians had more control over the education of their children, Republicans would cannibalize public-education funding and destroy the futures of impoverished Floridians, progressive activists and lawmakers allied to the teachers’ unions argued.
Just a couple of months into the new school year, proponents of the expanded choice programs say reality bears little resemblance to those ominous predictions.
More than 90,000 additional Florida students are enrolled in private schools and innovative education programs using state scholarships than at this time last year, thanks to the universal school-choice bill passed during this year’s legislative session. The legislation lifts income requirements on the state’s two largest school-choice scholarship programs — one funded through corporate tax credits, and one funded with state dollars — giving families more school options and injecting more competition into the state’s education system.
The change essentially made choice scholarships available to all K-12 students in the state. Through October 6, there were 256,031 Florida students enrolled in the two largest school-choice scholarship programs, a 43 percent increase over about 178,520 who were enrolled in the programs this time last year, according to data provided to National Review by Step Up For Students, the non-profit that awards most of the state’s choice scholarships.
And about 15,000 more students are enrolled in a new scholarship program for home-school students, according to both Step Up and the Florida Department of Education.
Supporters of the measure say the increase in the number of students applying for and using the scholarships shows that many Floridians are looking for options that better fit their families’ needs beyond their zoned district schools. The scholarship increases have so far fallen in line with state projections, despite predictions from critics that expanding the programs could cost billions of dollars more than expected and blow a massive hole in the state’s budget.
Florida House Speaker Paul Renner told National Review that the increase in the number students accessing the scholarships is “exactly what we hoped for” when lawmakers passed House Bill 1 in March. “I’m extremely happy that these new students will be able to customize their education and go to the school that best fits their needs,” he said.
Calling Out Critics of School Choice
Florida has long been a national leader in school choice. It is one of eight Republican-led states that have recently made choice options available to almost all students. Several other red states have also expanded their choice programs, even though they’re not open to all kids.
Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, said Florida’s school-choice scholarships had been growing “pretty dramatically” even before lawmakers axed the income limits this year. He said the elimination of the income limits simply “added a little more umph to the growth.”
The idea, he said, is to increase competition and to fuel innovation, leading to “a lot more growth with very innovative 21st-century learning environments” that look a lot different than the “one-size-fits-all Henry Ford industrial model” schools that many people are used to.
Democrats and critics of the expansion called it “reckless,” and claimed that “already underfunded public school districts will be financially gutted.” Lauren Book, the Florida Senate Democratic leader, called the choice scholarships “free handouts for the excessively wealthy designed to defund public schools.” A recent op-ed writer in the Orlando Sentinel called the expansion a “scheme to weaken our public schools” and a “dark design to destroy public education.” She accused Governor Ron DeSantis of trying to segregate students — “severing his straight, white Christian philosophy from our modern democratic ethos.”
The Florida Policy Institute, a left-leaning research organization, predicted the program would cost the state $4 billion in its first year, including $2 billion to fund scholarships for existing private-school and home-school students. That was about ten times more than the $209 million in additional state money the legislature had estimated in its fiscal analysis.
Step Up For Students said that FPI analysis was based on flawed assumptions and was rife with errors. Tuthill called the FPI’s $2 billion estimate “not a real number.”
“That was very much a political number to try to sideline the bill during session,” he said.
Spooked lawmakers put $350 million aside as a backstop in case the legislature’s estimates were off. Renner said that money likely won’t be touched.
“I’ll call them out right now,” Renner said of FPI and other critics who predicted fiscal catastrophe. “They were grossly over-inflated in their estimates, and that they did so, in my mind, deliberately to stop kids from having the kind of customized, quality education that they deserve, and only for partisan purposes and in defense of their union allies that put the needs and interests of institutions and adults over the needs of children. And it’s wrong, and they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Renner said that after the vote to expand the school-choice program, “we’ve had Democrat members who have reached out to us, our staff, to find out how their families can benefit from the scholarship, even though they voted against our bill.”
So far, he said, the biggest hiccups with the expansion have been some delayed payments due to multiple layers of vetting of students and schools. Last month, DeSantis suspended four schools from the school-choice program due to what his administration described as “direct ties” to the Chinese Communist Party.
Pulling Down the Berlin Wall of Education
While it will take a few years for the true impact to be felt — private schools will need time to build new seats, innovative alternative programs will take time to develop, and a lot of Floridians are still learning about the expanded choice options — Tuthill said the vast majority of the state’s students will remain in the public-school system.
“No one is trying to destroy public education,” he said, adding that there has been a lot of “hysteria” around the expansion from critics.
“Obviously there is a ceiling somewhere,” Tuthill said of families requesting choice scholarships. “My guess, it’s probably around 500,000 or so in a state with 3 million kids.”
Florida was the fastest growing state last year. Even with more students taking advantage of the choice scholarships, Tuthill expects the public-school population to continue growing.
The expansion of the choice programs can help reduce pressure on districts to build new schools and to manage growth, he said. The school districts also get to keep all the local tax dollars and federal education money, even for kids who leave for private schools.
“I think there’s win-wins all the way around,” he said.
Historically, Florida’s choice scholarships have disproportionately benefited black and Hispanic kids and kids from single-family homes. In a state that has been at the center of a great deal of social- justice demagoguery, Renner called the choice scholarships “one of the most powerful civil rights, social-justice victories for poor, minority kids in the entire country. And now we’ve just extended that to middle-class minority students.”
Renner, who attended public school and whose mother was a teacher, said that Florida has some of the best public schools in the country. But, he said, “as long as we have a failing school, that child has, in my mind, a moral right to go somewhere to get an education. You can’t trap them in their zip code.”
Tuthill said the future of education is customization and innovations, and he expects to see an evolution of how people in Florida think about schools. He mentioned programs where kids spend much of their learning time on sail boats, in a national forest, or getting physics lessons using the roller coasters at Busch Gardens.
“We’re in a weird place where the people who like to think of themselves as progressives are very, very conservative and traditional. They do not want the innovation and change,” he said. “When people say, ‘You’re trying to destroy public education,’ what I hear is, ‘You’re trying to destroy my 1950s concept about what public education should be.’ And that’s true, we are trying to move away from a one-size-fits-all industrial model that’s been around really since the 1800s.”
“We’re pulling down education’s version of the Berlin Wall,” he said.
An Education Families Hunger For
The elimination of income limits on the Florida’s choice scholarships has allowed schools like Chesterton Academy of Orlando to expand. The school, a classical high school grounded in the Catholic faith, was founded in Central Florida last year. Tuition is $8,500 per year, low for a private school. It is part of a network of Chesterton schools in the U.S. and Canada.
Brandon Vogt, who helped found the school and is the chair of the school’s board, said the expansion of the choice-scholarships program allowed Chesterton Academy of Orlando to double from 27 students last year to 55 this year. All of them receive state scholarships.
“Most of them would tell you, without that state scholarship program, there’s just no way we’d be able to afford even the $8,500 tuition,” he said.
Vogt, 37, said that is true of his family, which includes eight kids between the ages of one and 14. His oldest son is a freshman at Chesterton. The others are home-schooled. But in a few years, he said, he’ll have three high-school-aged kids. Tuition for all three will top $25,000.
“That’s when the state scholarship program will really be significant for our family,” said Vogt, who works in publishing for a Catholic media organization.
Vogt said Chesterton doesn’t follow the typical public-school factory model where students sit in desks in rows and a teacher lectures in the front of the room. Instead, Chesterton students often sit at tables arranged in a circle, and they learn through dialogue and discussion that teachers lead. There’s an emphasis on philosophy, theology, and fine arts.
“All students learn to paint and to draw and to sing and to speak well, to think, to argue,” he said.
Chesterton teachers are Catholic, and its teachings are faithful to the Catholic church. And although students don’t have to be Catholic to attend Chesterton, they do attend Mass, pray before class, and celebrate the Catholic liturgical season.
“It’s imbued with this Catholic spirituality from beginning to end,” Vogt said of the school. “That’s what a lot of our families hunger for.”
Some critics allege that private schools getting state money teach pseudoscience and have an anti-gay agenda. Vogt said neither is true of Chesterton. They don’t teach young-earth creationism or that dinosaurs and humans co-existed or that evolution isn’t a legitimate theory.
“I think our science textbooks would be perfectly congruent with science textbooks in any public or private school,” he said.
Vogt said they also don’t discriminate based on a child’s gender or sexuality. “In fact, quite the opposite,” he said. “We teach that every person is created with great dignity.”
The surge of students attending schools like Chesterton should encourage traditional public schools to up their game, because if the public schools are underwhelming, parents now have other options, Vogt said.
“It can be a rising tide that lifts all boats,” he said of the school-choice expansion. “It will encourage public schools to ask themselves, ‘Why are kids drawn to a school like Chesterton? What are they offering that maybe we should consider offering ourselves?’”