Florida’s Record School Choice & The Power of Community Unity – Top 3 Takeaways
- School choice. With Floridians having now fully settled into the new school year, we have a clear picture about how Floridians decided to enter the new year...making use of school choice like never before. Florida has long been the national leader in school choice options but what’s happened as we’ve entered a new school year is an incredible expansion of parents and students making use of school choice like never before. This school year marks year two of Florida’s universal school choice law and as it has turned out, it’s the largest year of school choice expansion in Florida’s history. Prior to the passage of last year’s school choice law enabling all Floridian families to make use of vouchers worth $8,000 dollars or more, for the school of their choice, there were about 170,000 students using school vouchers in Florida. In year one of Florida’s school choice law, there was a significant increase (43%) to about 243,000 students at the start of the new school year. But year two is proving to have brought the biggest boom yet for school choice in Florida. The latest figures show approximately 488,500 students have started the new school year, in a school of their choosing. That’s a total representing over 17% of the total enrolled number of students K-12 and a total that’s greater than double last year’s total school choice enrollment at the same time. In my initial analysis of the impact of Florida’s new school choice law in April of 2023, I pointed out that the high-end estimate for the number of students who’d make use of school choice was 17.1%. In year two that’s what Florida’s school choice program is going to do which speaks to the...
- Incredible growth and popularity of educational choice being placed in the hands of parents and students rather than being placed at the mercy of assigned schools based on where lines are drawn on a map. And most importantly as school choice has grown in Florida, educational outcomes have continued to imporve in Florida. Florida’s K-12 graduation rate is at record highs, Florida’s 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores are at record highs and Florida has been ranked by US News and World Report as the top state for K-college education for two straight years. According to a study published last November in the American Economic Journal it was found that the benefits of Florida’s expanded school choice program benefit everyone. Quoting one of the authors of the study: The positive competitive effects of the launch or expansion of private school choice programs on system-wide educational outcomes is the most consistent finding in the entire field of school choice research. What was found in the research is that students using school choice options commonly performed better, which has long been known – hence the expansion to a universal school choice program – but as mentioned in that quote there’s a system-wide benefit to it. The bottom line is that as schools lose enrollment to other schools due to competition, they begin to perform better too. As summed up by the Reason Foundation: The more competition public schools faced for students, the better they performed over a 15-year period (the time frame nearly identical to the NAEP scores in Reason Foundation’s study). Competition led to improvements in test scores and other positive, measurable outcomes, such as declines in absenteeism and suspensions. What this means is that all students are set to benefit from the record amount of school choice being used in Florida – not just the students taking advantage of it. And if school choice is driving and delivering better outcomes in Florida and if there’s twice as much of it today as a year ago, there’s reason to believe this will be the most successful school year in Florida’s history yet.
- Community unity. During election cycles there’s often talk of “unity” by political parties and politicians. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes that’s trumped up (no pun intended). But when there’s real unity in a community on issues no one has to tell anyone there’s unity and it’s impressive to see what this unified community is capable of doing. In Friday’s Q&A regarding the proposed development of Johnathon Dickinson Park I said this: This type of proposal has been stopped once. It can be stopped again... While also suggesting that with enough public input it should be possible to defeat the proposal before coming to a vote (given that we’d done that before when it was first proposed in 2011). As we discussed yesterday, that’s exactly what was accomplished over the weekend with the organization behind the proposed development pulling the proposal and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection pulling the plan from their agenda. It was a huge and immediate win. It was also an example of what this community is capable of when there’s unity around a common goal. As I also pointed out however, Questions still remain about the proposals at the other eight state parks and whether this matter (at Johnathan Dickinson Park) is closed or whether another organization could step in with its own development plan. As Monday played out it appears that as of now only the Johnathan Dickinson Plan has been pulled from the state’s planning. The other eight state parks tagged for development are still under consideration by the state with future meeting dates for public comments that are being rescheduled. If you feel passionately about this issue generally, you have the ability to weigh in on all of them at once through the Great Outdoors Initiative’s portal. If the unity in this community that’s successfully saved Johnathan Dickinson State Park from development plans twice focuses on the issue statewide, there’s the potential to have a meaningful impact at stopping the entire initiative statewide.