As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, Step Up For Students today marks the 25th anniversary of Florida’s landmark education choice scholarship program.
The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) went into effect July 1, 2001, after House Speaker Tom Feeney and Senate President John McKay shepherded the bill through the Florida Legislature, and Gov. Jeb Bush signed it into law. The program gave corporations credit for redirecting their state tax obligations to help low-income families send their children to the private schools of their choice.
In its first year, the FTC funded scholarships for 15,585 students. Step Up For Students had 41 donors who contributed $45.2 million. Those modest beginnings sparked a revolution in empowering families to choose the learning environment that works best for their children.
Today, Florida is the national leader in education choice, with over 540,000 students using one of four K-12 choice scholarships administered by Step Up For Students, the largest non-profit scholarship funding organization in the nation. Since its inception in 2002, Step Up has administered more than 3 million scholarships.
This year, 164 Step Up donors contributed over $656 million to the FTC program. All told, 750 donors have contributed $9.2 billion over the last quarter-century.
“It has been an honor of a lifetime to work with thousands of dedicated people who helped Florida move to a new definition of public education: low-income parents, educators, civil rights leaders and legislators. They all played critical roles,” said John Kirtley, founder and chairman of Step Up For Students. “Under this new definition, we empower Florida families to choose, or even create, the educational experience that will maximize their children’s chances for success.”
Since 2023, every program has operated as an education savings account (ESA), giving families flexibility in how they spend their children’s funds. They can use them not only to pay for tuition and fees at private schools, but also textbooks, curriculum, digital materials, tutoring, therapies and other approved educational expenses for home education or other learning environments.
As a result, more than 150,000 students on a Step Up scholarship are not enrolled full time in a private or public school and are choosing learning options in an “a la carte” fashion. This has created a burgeoning education marketplace of providers and innovators to meet families’ needs. Step Up has over 160 product vendors on its MyScholarShop online platform offering over 80,000 educational products, 7,500 businesses (not counting private schools) and 19,000 individual service providers.
“We are thrilled to have set the national standard in offering families the diverse learning options they deserve,” said Gretchen Schoenhaar, CEO of Step Up For Students. “We continue to innovate in technology and refine our processes that define the customer experience, encourage more providers to enter the marketplace and transform education.”
More than half of the state’s K-12 students – nearly 1.9 million – use an education option of their parent’s or guardian’s choosing other than their assigned district school. That includes magnet schools and career academies, charter schools, private schools, home education, and hybrid options, such as part-time microschools and co-ops. Plus, 52 of Florida’s 67 school districts have partnered with Step Up to offer fee-based classes and services to home education students on choice scholarships, paid for with scholarship funds – the only state to provide that.
Beginning in 2027, the Step Up Step Further Scholarship Fund plans to administer the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit Program. Individual taxpayers will receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 when they donate to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) of their choice. The scholarships will provide eligible K-12 families in both public and private schools additional resources for tuition, tutoring, technology, and educational resources.
As Florida leads, the nation follows. The branch of the FTC planted 25 years ago continues to bear fruit. Step Up For Students looks forward to a year-long celebration of this milestone.
Emilio has settled into his new life in Florida, where he loves the weather and seeing alligators.
APOPKA – The days were long when the family lived up north, when Maria Alvaracin and her husband, Fernando Ramirez, worked two and sometimes three jobs each in one day just to afford rent and food and gas for the car they shared.
Maria cleaned houses and worked the overnight shift at McDonald’s, while Fernando worked in construction and landscaping, and sometimes painted cars.
“You need to start somewhere,” Maria said.
In 2017, they immigrated from their native Ecuador to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and left behind a country in political turmoil to build a better life for their son Emilio. But it was as if the young family was running in place. The ends never seemed to meet.
They had family in Florida, and they urged Maria and Fernando to move south, where the cost of living is cheaper, and the weather is much nicer.
So, they packed everything they had from their two-bedroom apartment into a small U-Haul truck and made a three-day drive to Florida before the start of the 2022-23 school year. They settled in Apopka, where they found another perk to raising a family in the Sunshine State – education choice scholarships.
Emilio, 9, attends Central Florida Preparatory School on a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) made possible by corporate donations to Step Up For Students, which manages the program.
Emilio is a third grader at CFP, a PK-to-12 private school in Apopka.
An honor roll student who excels in reading and math, Emilio said he loves his school so much he feels he’s going to burst with excitement.
“The education here is great,” he said. “The teachers here are very nice. They’re amazing.”
That is the reaction Maria was hoping for when she and Fernando searched for the right educational setting for their son.
He attended the first grade at his district school in Cambridge, and it was a rough experience.
Emilio has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and it was exacerbated by the large class size, which made it difficult for him to concentrate on the task at hand. Maria wanted fewer distractions that come with a favorable teacher-to-student ratio, hoping that could make the adjustment to life in the new country easier for Emilio.
“We’re trying to do our best for him to empower all his ability and skills, everything he already has, because he’s an amazing kid,” she said.
Emilio? Well, he wants to explore his school's science lab. Upon seeing the room when touring CFP with his parents, Emilio turned to Maria and said, “Mommy, this is my school.”
He’ll have to wait until he reaches middle school before he can take classes in the science lab and join the robotics club. So, Emilio is biding his time by building his own robot at home. He calls it “Fix It,” and it is the prototype for the life-size robot he plans to someday build. Fix It will be able to fetch and fix objects with the press of a button. Maybe, Emilio said, he’ll build Fix It so it can transform into a car.
This kid has big ideas.
“He’s always the light in the room,” Maria said.
Maria loves spending her afternoons helping Emilio with his homework.
On a recent morning, Emilio held court behind the desk in the office of CFP Vice Principal Julia Najera, talking about everything from building robots to his favorite teachers, his project for the school’s International Night program, his desire for a Harry Potter club and his younger brother, Samuel, who just celebrated his third birthday.
“He’s not shy,” Najera said. “He’s very lively. He has a big personality.”
That personality was quashed while Emilio attended school up north. Maria said he was depressed and often cried because he wasn’t doing well in school. Plus, the move from Ecuador to Cambridge was somewhat unsettling for Emilo, and he began to miss his family in his native country.
That changed once the family reached Apopka. They are surrounded by family, and Maria and Fernando were able to find jobs in the fields they worked in Ecuador. Maria works at an advertising agency, and Fernando works in IT.
They found CFP and the nurturing environment that Emilio needed.
“When we think about the culture of CFP, it’s the family feel that we want to create,” Najera said. “Emilio definitely represents that.”
Maria also offered high praise for the scholarship, because they don’t need to include private school tuition in their budget.
“It’s great because we can pay the rent and not have to work two jobs each, and now I can spend more time with Emilio,” she said.
Since Maria works remotely, she has time in the afternoon to help Emilio with his homework. And Maria said she loves helping Emilio with his homework.
“The scholarship is huge,” Maria said. “Emilio is not depressed anymore. He’s not crying every day. For us, it’s a relief because I feel like we’re doing something greater for my son.”
Legislative preview: Fighting over the state budget is expected to dominate the Legislature in this election year. The top education issues being considered are potential revisions in H.B. 7069, which boosts charter schools, expanding Bright Futures scholarships and a bill providing scholarships for bullied K-12 students. Other issues include a bill requiring completion of a financial literacy course to graduate, an effort to expand computer coding, the use of schools as emergency shelters and a bill that would allow some employees to carry guns into schools. Tampa Bay Times. Tallahassee Democrat. Orlando Sentinel. News Service of Florida. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Associated Press. Palm Beach Post. Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Schools face sanctions: Thirty-one Florida private schools face possible sanctions for failing to file financial reports as the state requires by the Sept. 15 deadline. The law requires any private school that receives $250,000 or more in Florida Tax Credit Scholarships for low-income students or Gardiner Scholarships for students with special needs to submit reports to the nonprofits that administer the scholarships. Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, helps administer both scholarship programs. redefinED. A troubled Pine Hills private school will close if it can no longer receive money from the state's scholarship programs, the school's attorney tells the Department of Education. Agape Christian Academy filed false fire inspections, hired people with criminal records and failed to pay its employees, according to records, leading to a state ban on any state scholarship money going to the school. Education Commissioner Pam Stewart will make a decision on the school's appeal of the ban. Orlando Sentinel.
Private school restrictions: A bill is filed that would prohibit individuals who have filed for bankruptcy within the past five years from operating private schools that accept students who receive state scholarship money. Filed by Sen. Linda Stewart, D-Orlando, the bill would apply to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, which serves more than 100,000 students. Orlando Sentinel.
The “triply disadvantaged” students who participate in the nation’s largest private school choice program enroll in college and obtain degrees at higher rates than like students in public schools, and those rates climb the longer the students use the scholarship, according to a first-of-its-kind study released this morning by The Urban Institute.
The college enrollment rate overall is 15 percent higher for the low-income students who use Florida tax credit scholarships, the study found. That climbs to about 40 percent higher for students who use a scholarship at least four years.
The longer students participate in the Florida tax credit scholarship program, the more likely they are to enroll in college, compared to peers who do not receive scholarships. Chart by Step Up For Students, using data from the Urban Institute.
Meanwhile, scholarship students are 8 percent more likely to obtain associate degrees. That number rises to 29 percent for those who secured scholarships in earlier grades and used them at least four years.
Annual evaluations of standardized test results in the scholarship program have consistently found the average student who uses the program to attend a private school makes roughly one year's academic progress in one year's time.
They've also found students who use the scholarships tend to be more disadvantaged than other lower-income students who don't use them.
Urban Institute authors Matthew M. Chingos and Daniel Kuehn describe scholarship students this way: "They have low family incomes, they are enrolled at low-performing public schools (as measured by test scores), and they have poorer initial test performance compared with their peers."
Studies have looked at long-term outcomes for other programs that help disadvantaged students pay private school tuition.
They found students in Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee were more likely to graduate high school or attend college, respectively, if they received a voucher.
But researchers haven't looked as much at college enrollment among students who received scholarships from big, statewide programs. The Urban Institute report is unprecedented in its scale. It looks at more than 10,000 students across the nation's third-largest state. It uses data from the Florida Department of Education, as well as Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that helps administer the scholarships.
Unpacking the findings (more…)
