Florida schools are closing, but not everyone blames school choice

Florida’s public school enrollment rate is dropping, but experts are divided on how much its universal school choice program is to blame.

Multiple districts in the state are closing schools, as attendance falls while thousands of students flock to private school or homeschooling options.

Some experts believe the shift is the natural result of giving parents more options in schooling, while others say Florida’s “lack of transparency” in private school data is hiding a bigger story.

“I don’t think it would be a surprise, or that it should be surprise, that as school choice grows significantly, that it means people are often leaving public schools, and, as that occurs, public schools and public-school districts may have to change how they operate,” said Neal McCluskey, director for the Center for Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute. “That may mean some schools should shut down.”

“That is not a problem with choice because choice in this case — people are selecting something that they think works better for themselves. And that’s ultimately what we should want for the education system, is that people are getting what they think is the best education for their unique kids and for their families,” McCluskey added.  

Declines in Florida public schools have hit some of the largest areas in the state, such as Duval, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Leaders of Broward County Public Schools are considering closing 42 schools.

Florida expanded its eligibility for school choice vouchers to all students regardless of income last year but has long had more school choice options than other states.

State data show that since 2019, 68,000 students have moved to charter schools. Private school enrollment has gone up almost 50,000 from the 2019-20 school year to the 2022-23 one. And, in the last five years, homeschooling increased 58.6 percent.

Only five other states have universal school choice programs, and so far, none have seen public school closures on the same scale as Florida. It remains unclear if they will soon catch up.

Damaris Allen, executive director for Families for Strong Public Schools in Florida, says the state has long been underfunding public schools, leading families to want to choose other options.  

“I think it’s a variety of factors, and one of them definitely is class size. I know for a fact, I’ve heard from a number of parents that one of the reasons that they are opting to remove their kids from traditional public schools and try and place them in a private school is because the class sizes are smaller, and the class sizes are exacerbated because of the lack of funding,” Allen said.

And those high public school class sizes are coupled with a teacher shortage in Florida, with a report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in 2022 showing 5,294 teacher vacancies in the state, the highest in the nation.

She also pointed to other controversial education initiatives in the state, which has made headlines over its book bans, lessons on race and the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

State officials, Allen said, “have consistently favored private and charter school options, and they have not done their constitutionally required duty to ensure that we have a system of high-quality public education.” 

Joshua Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said that while “there’s no question that voucher schemes are growing,” Florida’s “lack of transparency” on data around school choice options makes it difficult to determine the true cause of public-school enrollment declines. He says many of the students in the choice programs never were in public institutions in the first place.

“We know that in both the number of kids using it and the dollars being spent, but we know almost nothing about those children. Other than that, we know that they the vast majority were already in private school,” Cowen said.

“We’re seeing all the declines in lots of different public-school districts across the country, including districts that don’t have vouchers at all. Some of that is that there are kids leaving for different states. … Florida’s a little bit more complicated, because there are population increases in some places, but we don’t know. And what’s not true is that the growth of the voucher program is the only explanation,” he added.

The school choice movement has grown exponentially in the time since the COVID-19 pandemic, with most programs only recently getting implemented. Time will tell if they follow in Florida’s footsteps.

“Florida and Arizona have had choice for decades, and they just have a lot of a lot more options, I think, because they’ve had such a rich ecosystem of choice and were able to offer options to families for such a long time. So they’ve been able to develop that,” said Marty Lueken, director of fiscal research and education center at EdChoice.

“It’s hard to say for sure with certainty what the cause is of the public school enrollment declines,” he added.