Six states have now passed universal school choice programs, but Florida has been singularly effective at accomplishing what Republicans have had near the top of their agenda for decades: destroying public education.
As The Hill reports, public schools in Florida are shutting down in multiple districts due to a rapid loss of students. Meanwhile, private school enrollment is up by more than 50,000 students, and charter schools have picked up 68,000. Homeschooling has increased by 58.6%, which would likely be even higher if parents weren’t competing for a limited number of available homeschool vouchers. Despite those vouchers expanding by 40,000 a year, they still can’t keep up with demand.
No other state has seen anything even close to this vast shift away from public education.
So why are Florida Republicans so successful in reducing public school enrollment? Because they did their homework. They spent decades draining public school funding, making them poorly staffed, poorly run, and an overall miserable place to get an education. Then they created a voucher system that offers parents unmatched goodies for joining in the enterprise of keeping children ignorant while making right-wing “education” providers rich.
The reason that Republicans want to destroy public education has never been much of a mystery. As Barbara Miner at Rethinking Schools puts it:
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Education is a multibillion-dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars.
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Conservatives are devoted to the free market and believe that private is inherently superior to public.
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Shrinking public education furthers the Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector.
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Privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of support for the Democratic Party.
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Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
If that’s not enough, most private schools are Christian, so many of them propagate a conservative view of history and science that Republicans fully favor. Of the parents who have pulled their kids from public schools for homeschooling, 91% describe themselves as Christians, and many popular homeschool curricula radically whitewash history, deny climate change and evolution, and are simply awful.
Few states have matched Florida when it comes to undermining public schools to make the alternatives look better.
In 2007, Florida’s investment in public education was about average. The state had one of the worst high school graduation rates in the nation and poor student performance in science, but those numbers were improving. But they didn’t keep improving.
Florida began cutting its investment in public education, becoming one of the most drastically underfunded states over the last decade. Florida now has the lowest teacher salaries in the nation, and is ranked No. 48 in spending per student.
The state did institute a funding program that rewards businesses with tax breaks for educational investments—so long as those investments go to voucher programs. As a result, the program simultaneously feeds private schools by directly putting money in their pockets and starves public schools through loss of tax funding.
While Florida Republicans have been unwilling to invest in teachers or students, they have been more than willing to spend time and money on policing school libraries and making Christian nationalism a core tenet of the curriculum.
Florida has imposed new history standards that require teachers to tell students that Black people benefited from slavery and that Black people are responsible for the Tulsa massacre. Some entire subjects have even been banned from Florida classrooms.
Additionally, teachers have been banned from using preferred names and pronouns. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pioneered “don’t say gay” laws and spent money settling lawsuits rather than educating students.
The combination of low teacher pay, poor student investment, harsh state oversight, and a restrictive curriculum that cripples students’ ability to learn has all but destroyed Florida’s public schools. It’s not hard to understand why parents and students would want something better. They deserve something better.
This is exactly how Florida created unprecedented demand for alternatives.
As a bonus for parents who choose to homeschool their children, the state is willing to cover Disney passes and giant televisions. No questions asked. So it’s absolutely no surprise that Florida’s available homeschool vouchers were all snatched up for this school year and are expected to double next year.
But Florida isn’t the only state that has caught onto the make-it-terrible-and-they-will-leave system of driving kids to private schools. Tennessee now comes in just ahead of Florida on spending per student, and ranks No. 44 on teacher pay. Tennessee’s Republican legislature is considering the unprecedented step of turning down federal funding for education in hope of evading federal requirements on education. Not even Florida went that far.
Fortunately for Tennessee children, the legislature broke into factions and failed to pass Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher plan this year. But it will surely try again next year.
And Tennessee can always look to Florida as its model.
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers’ salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
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