Scholarship Implementation

Why Florida cheers loudest during National School Choice Week

01/29/16 | Travis Pillow

national school choice weekToday is the final day of National School Choice Week, and once again, no state was more active than Florida. Organizers say school districts, private and charter schools, virtual education providers and home school cooperatives here planned 2,057 events marking the occasion — more than any other state.

This is partially a function of population. Florida has more schools than all but three states, and more students than all but two.

But a host of numbers, including some new ones released this week, suggest that choice in all its forms runs deeper and broader here than almost anywhere else. National data isn’t detailed enough to produce a timely “changing landscape” document for the entire country, but here’s what we do know.

  • Only one state (California) has more magnet schools than Florida. And only one state (Michigan) has a higher percentage of public schools that are magnets, according to the most recent elementary and secondary yearbook from the U.S. Department of Education.
  • According to the same federal data, nearly 15 percent of Florida’s public schools were charters in the 2013-14 school year, and more than 26 percent are either magnets or charters. Only in one other state (Arizona) are those percentages higher.
  • Florida is home to roughly a third of all students in the country using tax credit scholarships to attend private schools, and its McKay scholarships account for about a fifth of all students using vouchers, according to new reports from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and the Black Alliance for Educational Options.
  • At the cutting edge of educational choice, Gardiner Scholarships for special needs students have surpassed Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to become the largest education savings account program in the nation, according to Friedman’s ABCs of School Choice.
  • With its pioneering statewide virtual school and new course access program, Florida consistently gets high marks from digital learning advocates.

In an earlier interview, Andrew Campanella, the president of National School Choice Week, said organizers of the annual celebration are once again “seeing record participation across the board — district schools, charter schools, magnet schools, private schools, online academies and home schooling groups.” Growing participation reflects the fact that around the country, “more parents are actively choosing schools and educational environments for their children than ever before,” he added.

There are other signs choice has gone mainstream. Major newspapers like the Tampa Bay Times now publish entire special sections this time of year to help parents navigate their educational options.

That should underscore another message from this week’s festivities, Campanella said. In many school districts, choice applications come due in late January, and parents shouldn’t wait until summer break to begin their search.

“When you talk about school choice in a state for more than a decade, and people hear about it a lot, it starts to become, in some places the norm,” he said, adding: “We want people to look at this as being informative and helpful, because parents don’t look at this being controversial.”

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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.