Over the course of five years, more than 26,000 Florida students migrated from private schools to charter schools, according to state enrollment surveys.
That number comes from an analysis of seven years of student transfer data kept by the state Department of Education. It suggests that over time, the students who leave Florida's private schools for public schools disproportionately favor charter schools — new alternatives that may share attributes with the schools they left behind.
At the same time, the number of students leaving private schools for public schools overall appears to be declining.
Together, these tends, which emerge from the data on students who transferred from private schools to public schools analyzed by redefinED, may help shed new light on the changing landscape of educational choice.
As charter schools have spread in Florida, they have seen a growing number of transfers from private schools.
Just a few decades ago, the choice facing most parents was largely a binary one. Most would enroll their children at the local public school. Those who could afford tuition might send them to a private school.
The rapid, and still recent, rise of charter schools is changing that equation all over the country, presenting students with sought-after alternatives to their zoned public schools, and with tuition-free alternatives to private ones.
In Florida, the existence of some of the nation's largest private school scholarship programs is changing the picture further still, by giving more families the means to afford private school tuition. Their own rapid growth appears to be shoring up total private school enrollment.
One such program, the Florida tax credit scholarship program, is administered by Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post.
The data on private-school-to-public-school-transfers are based on state enrollment surveys, which ask public schools to note where students were enrolled the previous school year. The numbers show:
