Proponents of educational freedom in Georgia often hold up Florida as a paragon of empowering families to choose the education that best fits their children’s needs. But with so much of the focus on private choice, it’s easy to forget that freedom also means the ability to move among public schools.
That’s particularly worth remembering as Florida has hit a new milestone: 51% of all K-12 students there exercised educational choice in 2023-24, the latest year for which data are available. That’s nearly 1.8 million students out of about 3.5 million, according to Step Up for Students, a nonprofit that administers private choice programs in Florida.
Surprisingly, most of those 1.8 million students were still enrolled in a public school.
The largest segment of choice students in Florida, almost 400,000 kids, attended public charter schools. The second-largest group, almost 275,000 kids, took advantage of Florida’s open enrollment laws to attend a traditional public school other than the one they were zoned for.
Other options – such as career and professional academies, magnet schools, university-run lab schools and more – brought the total number of students making a public-school choice to about 1.1 million.
So, even in arguably the No. 1 state for school choice, where just over half the students exercise it, kids outside the public system remain the smallest group.
You have about 1.7 million Florida kids in their zoned, traditional public school taking a standard course of study.
You have about 1.1 million doing something else but still in a public school.
And you have about 700,000 attending a private school or homeschooling, with or without using taxpayer funds.
What does all that mean?
First, it means that even advocates for educational freedom are selling it short. Educational freedom means a lot more than a voucher program here or a tax-credit scholarship there. Those are essential elements of ensuring all students can access the education that best meets their needs, but they aren’t the only ones.
Second, it means opponents of educational freedom are equally but differently short-sighted. They fight almost all alternatives to sending kids to their zoned, traditional school.
But as Florida demonstrates, even if students can easily leave the public schools altogether, more families will stay in a public school if there are robust options available to them. That includes students at their zoned schools.
As Step Up’s Patrick Gibbons writes, “If families are surrounded by options and still choose their assigned public school, isn’t that a choice, too? In that light, Florida may already have a 100% choice system, because staying is just as much a decision as leaving.”
But that’s only true if families are truly surrounded by options — which isn’t what we have in Georgia.
Here it’s extremely difficult to determine how many families use our open-enrollment laws to send students to traditional public schools outside their attendance zone. The Georgia Public Policy Foundation reported last year that these data are hard to get and inconsistently reported. But the best we could tell, fewer than 21,000 Georgia students chose open enrollment – about 1/13th as many as in Florida, even though we have about half as many students.
The development of charter schools has also lagged behind, as local school districts each year turn down high-quality applications to create innovative new public schools. Georgia has about one-sixth as many charter school students as Florida – again, despite having half as many students overall.
There are reforms that could help Georgia’s public schools compete better with private schools, whether students have state programs to help them make choices or not. It’s telling that public-school advocates at the Gold Dome would rather kill new private choice programs than loosen any restrictions keeping public schools from competing.
As Florida shows us, there’s a better way.