Frank

When people hear the term “school choice,” they usually don't think about it in a traditional public school setting, said Joy Frank, general counsel for the Florida Association of District School Superintendents. But public school districts offer students a growing array of choice programs, too, from online classes to career academies to International Baccalaureate programs.

“We have embraced choice,” Frank told members of the Florida House Choice & Innovation Subcommittee during its first meeting this week.

Frank’s comments are another sign of evolving perceptions regarding parental school choice. She and others who are grounded in the traditional public school camp may not embrace publicly funded private options such as vouchers and tax credit scholarships. But it wasn’t long ago that even public options such as IB and magnet schools were considered controversial. Implicit in her remarks is an acknowledgement that giving parents more choice for their children is a worthy goal.

Frank went on to tout public school choice programs across the state, including Polk County’s Central Florida Aerospace Academy, which has a high school at the Lakeland Regional Airport. She also lauded the phenomenal growth of school choice in Miami-Dade County, which opened its first magnet school in 1973 and now offers some 340 choice programs serving 43,000 students. (Coincidentally or not, the Miami-Dade school district also has among the highest rates of students enrolled in charter schools and private schools via tax credit scholarships.)

Traditional school leaders in Florida are increasingly making similar statements. (more…)

The latest official report on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship places enrollment this fall at 48,938 students – a level that ranks the program among the nation’s top 100 largest school districts.

The scholarship is not a district, of course; it serves students in 1,298 different private schools across the state. The students are not economically diverse, either; the scholarship is only for those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and the average income last year was only 12 percent above poverty.

So these enrollment numbers speak only to parental interest, and the trend is strong. Enrollment has quadrupled in eight years, doubled in the past four. For the third consecutive year, the nonprofit that oversees the scholarship, Step Up For Students, was forced to close applications and place parents on a waiting list. Even with an increase of roughly 10,000 students this year, the organization has more than 11,000 who have signed up to be notified of more scholarships. In a year in which traditional public school enrollment is forecast to increase by only 1.2 percent, the scholarship program likely will grow by 25 percent.

Not surprisingly, some of the largest growth is coming in urban districts, with Miami-Dade adding nearly 2,500 more students and Orlando/Orange County adding close to 1,000. For the number crunchers, here is a spreadsheet of enrollment by district for the past eight years.