Great News on School Choice, Part II

Yesterday’s column celebrated election results in Texas, where voters ejected several Republican state lawmakers who opposed school choice.

This presumably means that Texas next year will add its name to the list of states that give parents the right to pick the best school for their children.

Today’s column is going to share good news about Florida, which significantly expanded its school choice system last year.

The results are so spectacular that even establishment media outlets can’t help but notice. Here are some excerpts from a remarkable report in Politico by Andrew Atterbury.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling. Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools. …DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.” …How traditional public schools handled the pandemic, as well as disagreements over curriculum and subject matter, have…contributed to parents leaving, according to school choice advocates. “If your product is better, you’ll be fine. The problem is, they are a relic of the past — a monopolized system where you have one option,” Chris Moya, a Florida lobbyist representing charter schools and the state’s top voucher administering organization, said of traditional public schools. “And when parents have options, they vote with their feet.” …Private school enrollment across Florida rose by 47,000 students to 445,000 students from 2019-20 to 2022-23… A growing number of families also chose to homeschool their children during this span, as this population grew by nearly 50,000 students between 2019-20 and 2022-23, totaling 154,000 students.

At the risk of understatement, Politico is not a conservative publication like National Review or a libertarian outlet like Reason.

I’m guessing the folks who work at Politico lean to the left, like the vast majority of journalists.

Yet it publishes an article with a headline about Florida’s “wildly successful” system of school choice.

The bottom line is that Florida’s success isn’t a surprise to people who follow the research on school choice. But it is a surprise to see the establishment media acknowledging this to be the case.

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