A warning to blue-state governors from the Florida voucher wreckage

Blue-state governors take note: The federal government is dangling billions of dollars in school choice money in front of your states, and Florida’s experience shows exactly what that money actually buys.

It buys a $4 billion-a-year entitlement with almost no strings attached. There is no reliable accounting of which children are receiving the funds, no requirement that private schools hire qualified teachers and no meaningful way to know whether students are learning anything at all.

As a Florida state senator, I’ve watched my state become a cautionary tale for what happens when politicians trade accountability for a talking point. Before you accept a single federal voucher dollar, look at what’s happened in my state.

Florida has had education vouchers that divert tax dollars to private schools and homeschool students since the 1990s. But beginning in 2023, the Florida legislature eliminated income eligibility caps and made taxpayer-funded universal vouchers available to virtually every school-aged child in the state, making it the second state to do so after Arizona enacted similar legislation.

Florida taxpayers are now on the hook for more than $4 billion of taxpayer-funded school vouchers annually. There is virtually no accountability for these dollars. There is little oversight of the finances, academic standards or hiring of teachers at voucher-funded private schools.

Bipartisan attempts to increase accountability and oversight have been stymied in each of the last three legislative sessions. Which invites many questions.

If Florida is truly a state that protects our children and our tax dollars, why is it failing to implement these guardrails? Is this about expanding so-called school choice or about selling off public education for privatization and profit? And where is our money really going?

Whereas Arizona has ghost children receiving voucher dollars and North Carolina last year sent more vouchers to private schools than there were students in them on any given day in the 2024-2025 school year, Florida could not account for where 30,000 children were attending school or where $270 million associated with them was being spent.

Cost overruns have increased exponentially when universal voucher use exceeded enrollment projections to the point where Florida had to hastily transfer $118 million into education coffers, and the state had to backfill $47 million to school districts after payments had been paid to scholarship funding organizations, even though the students were actually enrolled in public schools. This is up from the $18.4 million overpaid to scholarship funding organizations in the prior year. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One Florida private school was found to have accepted vouchers for students who live 130 miles away , and multiple parents have been arrested for defrauding the voucher system . In 2025, a Florida man was indicted for allegedly scamming the Arizona voucher system by creating fictitious children and submitting applications for them over multiple years. This proved that someone could take advantage of an unregulated system even from beyond the state’s borders.

Although there is a clear need to protect children receiving vouchers from bad actors, the reason vouchers are promoted is the academic gain promised to students and families. In Florida, there is scant data on academic outcomes of students as compared to students in public schools, because voucher students are not required to take the same exams.

But there is a body of respected academic literature from multiple states, including Louisiana , Ohio and Indiana , documenting that voucher students’ academic outcomes suffer in comparison to those of public school students. Researcher Josh Cowen compared the learning loss experienced by voucher students to that seen after Hurricane Katrina.

Homeschooling raises the same accountability concerns. Although some homeschooled students succeed academically, there is no clear apples-to-apples evidence that homeschooling produces better outcomes than public schools. Likewise, there are no published graduation rates, so the trajectory of these students is unknown.

So Florida is using billions in public dollars to subsidize homeschooling without requiring comparable measures of student progress. If taxpayers are funding private education, they deserve to know whether children are actually learning.

The lesson from Florida and other universal voucher states is clear: When public funds flow to unaccountable private interests, children and taxpayers both lose. Scholarship funding organizations cannot say where thousands of children are on any given day, let alone prove those children are learning more than their public school peers. The federal tax credit voucher scheme will only deepen these problems at an even greater cost to taxpayers.

Governors and lawmakers across the country should heed Florida’s cautionary tale and reject this unregulated federal scheme and demand real accountability for every taxpayer dollar spent on private education.

Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat, is a member of the Florida State Senate representing District 17 since November 2024.