Rubio: Make Florida a model for nationwide private school choice

Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio says he wants to create a national tax credit scholarship program, modeled on the one in Florida, to create a “new pathway to school choice.”

In an interview with Campbell Brown of The 74, Rubio touts a proposal, which he also has pushed in the U.S. Senate. It would allow companies to give money to private scholarship funds in exchange for credits on their federal income taxes.

“I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet that’s going to solve everything,” Rubio says. “But it will provide yet one more avenue by which low-income parents can have access to a better education than the one their kids are getting now.”

Rubio says he wants to do away with the U.S. Department of Education, and that he sees little role for the federal government in K-12 education, beyond expanding Pell Grants for high school students who want vocational training, and supporting a his school choice proposal.

Florida’s tax-credit program is administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog and employs the author of this post. It was one of three private school choice programs signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, who is vying with Rubio for the Republican presidential nomination. Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles approved the state’s charter school law in 1996.

Support among Democrats has ebbed and flowed over the years. In the interview, Rubio notes that by the time he left the state Legislature in 2008, both charters and private school choice programs had become increasingly bipartisan.

“Over time, as individual students began to benefit from these programs, we found for example a majority of the African-American legislators that were Democrats began to become supporters of school choice,” he says. “So that’s a positive development.”


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.