This year Florida lawmakers set out to free the school districts.
The idea, championed by Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, is that in an era of ubiquitous school choice, districts are more accountable to parents and families than ever before. The state should ease some top-down regulations to help district schools compete effectively with private and charter schools.
This project—rethinking oversight of public schools in a state where nearly half of all students, and more each year, choose their school—will likely continue for years to come.
Some important nuance that often gets lost in the debates about how best to level the playing field between district schools and other education options: A school district is not simply an operator of schools.
Reducing regulations on districts in their capacity as operators of schools makes sense – and the deregulation package that is now law does just that. But school districts play multiple roles in public education. For some of those roles, regulations help ensure all students are treated fairly and the interests of taxpayers are protected in an increasingly diverse public education system.
Districts as operators of schools
A provision in HB 1, the 2023 legislation that launched the nation’s largest-ever expansion of education choice, ordered a review of state regulations governing school districts.
That helped set this year’s deregulation drive in motion.
The timing makes sense. A generation or two ago, Florida students had access to a small number of magnet schools. Beyond that, parents would send children to their assigned public school. Their only alternatives were to pay private tuition out of pocket or lie about their address.
Now, nearly 400,000 students attend charter schools. In the wake of HB 1, state-backed scholarships make private school tuition more affordable for hundreds of thousands more. Homeschooling is breaking into the mainstream. Districts themselves offer more diverse options than ever, through open enrollment and steadily expanding magnet and career academy programs.
In many parts of the state, it’s likely that if a child attends their assigned, district-run public school, their parent has made an affirmative decision that it’s the best option available. That same child may have siblings attending other options. Schools that don’t respond to the needs of families face a credible threat that those families will leave.
This form of accountability barely existed a few decades ago, and there’s credible evidence that heightened competition from private and charter schools has driven steady incremental gains in the performance of public schools over time.
The task, now, is finding ways to ease bureaucratic burdens (like the need to bring every teacher pay raise to the collective bargaining table) and regulation of inputs (like class sizes) so that district schools have more flexibility to compete effectively.
Regulating outcomes raises more complicated questions. During this year’s deregulation effort, lawmakers considered, but ultimately dropped, proposals to pare back graduation requirements and soften Florida’s third grade retention law.
The goal of those requirements is to make sure every child learns to read and masters specific literacy and numeracy skills before leaving high school. How expectations like this should apply, and be enforced, in a more pluralistic public education system where students have access to multiple options operating under different regulatory frameworks is a critical question that’s likely to arise as policymakers adapt to the third era of public education.
Districts as governing agencies
School districts don’t just operate schools themselves. They also regulate and administer other educational options. They maintain records of registered homeschoolers. They identify students for special education. In many states, including Florida, they are the primary authorizers of charter schools.
Top-down oversight of these functions by states often makes sense. A debate over federal Title I funding provides a case in point.
For the first two decades of Florida’s charter school movement, low-income charter school students did not always receive their fair share of federal funding.
Title I funding is distributed through school districts using a convoluted formula. Charter schools, especially those serving large numbers of low-income students, complained that districts would reserve an outsize share of this funding for themselves, using it to run district-wide programs that weren’t accessible to students attending charter schools.
A series of legislative changes fixed this. One provision placed strict limits on the amount of funding a district could withhold from eligible schools, including charters. It also froze the formula for determining eligible schools in the 2016-17 school year, which meant districts couldn’t change their criteria to render charter schools under their purview ineligible for Title I funding they previously received.
Those safeguards would have been watered down or eliminated in proposals that appeared in early drafts of this year’s district deregulation legislation. But it was amended out of the version that ultimately passed.
While districts could have tried to sell that proposal as easing a top-down state regulation, it was a mandate designed to ensure all students were treated fairly, regardless of what school they attend. Safeguarding that principle will remain an important role for state policy in an increasingly pluralistic public education system where diverse organizations operate public schools.
Districts as taxing authorities
Districts have another set of powers that sets them apart from other organizations that operate schools: The authority to levy taxes.
These powers are regulated by Florida law and the state constitution, which set clear limits on the taxes local governments can impose, even with approval from local voters.
As Florida’s public education system has become more diverse, the state has enacted new rules governing the funding school districts have raise through local taxes.
They have increasingly required school districts to share property tax revenue, and additional revenue raised through local referenda, on an equal per-student basis with charter schools.
Opponents of these changes could reasonably argue they amount to top-down impingements on district autonomy and local control.
But this increased regulation serves a clear purpose. It helps ensure that money districts raise through local taxes benefits all public-school students they’re responsible for serving, regardless of which schools they attend.
The bottom line
School districts have multiple functions. They are operators of schools. They are also regulators and administrators. And they are local taxing authorities.
In an increasingly diverse and pluralistic public education system, it will likely make sense to ease regulations on districts in their role as operators of schools, freeing them to provide educational offerings that respond to the needs of families.
But easing regulations of districts’ taxing, regulatory or administrative authority could run the risk of undermining freedom of choice and equal treatment for students.
It makes sense for different district roles to be regulated (and deregulated) differently.
