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Florida’s legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis deserve a lot of credit for delivering a victory for parents and children that was more than 40 years in the making.
DeSantis signed legislation today that establishes (near-) universal school choice in the Sunshine State, making it the fourth and by far the largest state to do so. The law will make every family in Florida eligible for up to $8,000 to spend on education outside the traditional public school system. The only hedge on the program’s universality is availability of funds, with lower-income families being first in line for what amounts to an education voucher.
The vouchers put families, not bureaucrats, in charge of educational decisions for their children. And by making schools work to attract students rather than automatically knowing the students will be assigned there because of where the students live, the vouchers encourage innovation and excellence.
“Fact of the matter is our school districts perform better because they’ve embraced choice,” DeSantis said. “Our charter schools [for example] perform better because they have to compete for individual students.”
Most data repeatedly and convincingly show that charter schools, public “education scholarships,” vouchers, and other versions of school choice work, far more often than not, to raise student performance and parental satisfaction. This is true in Florida, most notably among black students, who outperform black students in ordinary public schools in 31 of 38 categories. With black students otherwise traditionally more at risk of substandard educations, it is worth noting that black voters tend to support school choice even more heavily than other ethnic groups — although support is consistently strong across almost every demographic.
The surge in state school choice programs in the past two years, which reached its highest point today with DeSantis’s legislative success, represents the success of a movement that began in earnest in 1978 when progressive professors John Coon and Stephen Sugarman published a book called (naturally) Education by Choice. Alas, though, conservative activists and politicians embraced choice far more quickly than liberals did, and most newspaper editorial boards spent years leading the charge against the idea. Thus, what ought to have been a rapid mass movement in favor of choice instead became a brutal political slog.
In the past two years, though, the slog has become a sprint to the top. In that sprint, Florida now leads the way. By making more families eligible for choice, by far, than anywhere else in the country, Florida will help millions of children thrive.
