Florida’s 25-year record on school choice is a huge success, not a cautionary tale

Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D) recently warned the country that Florida’s education choice programs are a “wreckage” — a $4 billion entitlement with “almost no strings attached.” He asserted that there is no way to know whether students are learning, and that there are supposedly tens of thousands of children the state cannot find.

I oversee those programs, and I can tell you this is false. That is not the Florida I know or the Florida the data describe.

No state offers families more ways to educate their children than we do. During the 2024-2025 school year, the most recent year for which data are available, nearly 1.9 million students — 53 percent of all K-12 students in Florida — used an option their parents chose. Those include district magnet schools and career academies, charter schools, private schools, education choice scholarships, homeschooling and virtual school. I expect the number for the 2025-2026 academic year to be even higher than that.

Families are also mixing those options. Last year, more than 150,000 students receiving an education choice scholarship were not enrolled full-time in a public or private school. In Florida, funding follows the student. Meeting families where they are, rather than where a bureaucracy prefers them to be, has proved both popular and successful.

Contrary to what Smith asserts, Florida uses multiple metrics to gauge student success. Scholarship students in grades 3 through 10 are tested, and the results go to an independent research organization that publicly reports each participating school’s learning gains or losses. Schools file annual financial reports. All owners, operators, and employees who encounter students undergo background checks. Fraud is investigated and prosecuted. That is what accountability looks like, not the absence of it.

And when every family has a choice, there is a further check that no compliance regime can match: Parents can take the funds elsewhere.

Smith’s sharpest charge is that the state “could not account for” 30,000 students and $270 million. He is describing the quarterly cross-check that matches scholarship recipients against public-school enrollment rolls. Florida prohibits a student enrolled full-time in a public school from also receiving scholarship funds. But that cross-check is an accountability measure, not a confession that money vanished.

A review of the 2024–25 year found scholarship funds frozen for about 30,000 students whose names appeared on both lists while the Department of Education, scholarship funding organizations, and school districts resolved the discrepancies. Importantly, no money went missing.

Improvements to the match have since cut the number of students misidentified, which means timelier payments to families and districts and a cleaner program. The Hill has already had to correct Smith’s column on a related overpayment claim. The 30,000-student figure deserves the same scrutiny.

The question that matters is simpler: How are these students doing? An Urban Institute study found that students who received the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship were up to 43 percent more likely than their public-school peers to attend a four-year college, and up to 20 percent more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree. They also had higher college-going rates overall. The researchers described those students as “triply disadvantaged” — low family incomes, prior enrollment in low-performing public schools and weaker incoming test scores than their peers.

Smith draws from studies of other programs in Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana and attempts to draw a comparison of voucher learning-loss to Hurricane Katrina. But whatever their merits and drawbacks, those other states’ programs are not Florida’s. Some were overly regulated, poorly funded relative to private-school tuition or drew students into schools that were unprepared to serve them.

Florida’s record points the opposite direction — including for students who never leave their public school districts. As public schools have faced more competition from private-school choice, researchers have found lower rates of suspension and absence and higher reading and math scores, with the largest gains coming among lower-income students.

Critics have predicted since the beginning that school choice would destroy public education. But after 25 years of school choice, Florida has climbed the national ranks in math and reading , high-school graduation and accelerated course work and dual enrollment , among other measures. School choice does not deserve all the credit for all of these successes, but plainly it did not prevent the rise of our schools to be among the nation’s best or cause any sort of “wreckage.”

Smith’s opposition to school choice is flatly at odds with many of his own constituents’ interests. More than 10,000 students in his district receive scholarships, including more than 3,000 with special needs. Nearly 60 percent of them are non-white.

The federal Education Freedom Tax Credit would extend these options to even more Florida families, including those whose children remain in public schools, and would seed choice in states that have never tried it. Governors who have not opted in are turning down funds that can pay for tutoring, special-needs services, and after-school programs. That is a strange way to look out for families.

School choice is the truly liberating and successful education policy. Florida has a quarter-century of results to prove it.

Henry Mack is Florida’s Commissioner of Education.