I have been told that I am a unicorn: a registered Democrat who has repeatedly won countywide in an increasingly Republican county.

I was first elected to the Monroe County School Board without opposition in 2018. By then, I was already well known in my district as a passionate advocate for our public schools. Before filing to run, I reached out to virtually everyone I thought might be interested in the seat, told them I planned to run and asked for their support. One by one, I received it. In the end, no one filed to run against me.

In 2022, that support was tested at the ballot box. I faced a well-financed, politically savvy Republican opponent who had been recruited and endorsed by Moms for Liberty and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

I didn’t respond by running away from public education or by trying to out-partisan my opponent. I ran on my record and on my belief that strong public schools are essential to strong communities.

I won.

This year, the partisan question became even more explicit.

My opponent prominently displayed the word “CONSERVATIVE” on her campaign signs and made her political and religious identity an important part of her campaign. She attended churches encouraging voters to support a candidate who shared their Conservative Christian values and promoted publicly funded homeschooling and tuition vouchers. She even accused me of “hiding behind the nonpartisan label.”

But nonpartisan wasn’t a label I chose. Florida school board elections are nonpartisan by law.

And I wasn’t hiding.

People knew I was a Democrat.

So rather than fight an election over partisan identity, I made a different bet. I trusted voters to care more about what I stood for than the letter next to my name in other elections.

And I made what I stood for unmistakable.

I ran unabashedly for public education.

I talked about our successful schools and the extraordinary people who work in them. I talked about putting great teachers in every classroom—and paying and supporting them well enough that they can afford to stay. I talked about expanding opportunities for students through the arts, athletics, career and technical education, advanced academics, dual enrollment and field trips.

I talked about responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and protecting classrooms when budgets get tight.

Most of all, I refused to accept the premise that our public schools are failing institutions from which children need to escape. I talked about them as valuable community institutions worth protecting, investing in and making even better.

The voters responded.

I received 64 percent of the vote and won every precinct in Monroe County—including precincts that had voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump just two years earlier.

The voters didn’t suddenly become Democrats.

They knew I was a Democrat, and they voted for me anyway.

They chose a public education advocate for School Board.

And that makes me wonder whether the real lesson of this election has much to do with unicorns at all.

For years, education politics has been dominated by the language of “school choice”—vouchers, education savings accounts, publicly funded homeschooling and the growing movement of public dollars into private education. Advocates for public schools have too often allowed themselves to be put on the defensive, as though supporting the public system that educates the overwhelming majority of American children is somehow the politically risky position.

Maybe we have that backward.

My election certainly doesn’t prove that every person who voted for me opposes vouchers or publicly funded homeschooling. Elections aren’t referenda on a single issue. Many people who strongly support public schools also support a parent’s right to choose another option for their own child.

But there is an important difference between respecting individual choice and abandoning our collective commitment to public education.

And perhaps candidates have underestimated how many voters understand that distinction.

Supporting public schools is popular.

Supporting teachers is popular.

Giving children more opportunities is popular.

Believing every community should have an excellent public school is popular.

Those aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. They are community values.

So perhaps I’m not a unicorn after all.

Perhaps candidates don’t need to attack school choice to win the education debate.

Perhaps they simply need to stop being afraid to champion public schools.

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I’ve had to step away from the keyboard for a bit while dealing with a re-election campaign and there are only so many hours in a day. (Honestly, I’m still recovering from the last one... but here we go again.)

Today, though, I felt compelled to write after reading Tampa Bay Times reporter Jeff Solochek’s “The Education Gradebook“ post.

“The big story: A new funding organization with ties to public charter school company Academica has entered the $3.9 billion market for school choice vouchers.

The AltaVia Foundation won State Board of Education approval Thursday to serve as a scholarship funding organization and administer the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, Family Empowerment Scholarship and New Worlds Scholarship Accounts.”

Academica is Florida’s largest (and arguably most politically connected) corporate charter school network. Over the years, the company has amassed a substantial real estate empire funded through public education dollars.

A 2011 Miami Herald investigation, “Academica: Florida’s richest charter school management firm,” revealed that the Zulueta brothers — real estate developers who built their first charter school in 1997 — controlled more than $115 million in South Florida real estate through dozens of affiliated companies. Much of that property was exempt from taxes as “public schools” while simultaneously generating rental income from charter schools managed by Academica.

And that was in 2011.

At the time, Academica managed roughly 100–120 charter schools. Today, the organization reports more than 200 affiliated schools and institutions, while South Florida real estate values have roughly doubled — or more — since that earlier reporting.

Now, Academica appears poised to enter another publicly funded education market: school vouchers.

According to reporting, AltaVia expects to distribute approximately $178 million in scholarships annually by its third year of operation. Scholarship Funding Organizations are permitted to retain up to 3% for administrative costs.

More from Solochek:

“AltaVia was formed as a nonprofit in 2024 with the mission to “expand K-12 educational opportunity for low- and moderate-income families by pairing need-based scholarships.

The registered agent of the nonprofit is listed on LinkedIn as corporate counsel at Academica, a company that runs public charter schools through networks including Somerset and Mater Academy.

Its president, Judith Marty, is currently president of the Academica-affiliated Doral College and former chief academic officer at Mater Academy. Its vice president Bernardo Montero, is listed as special adviser to Marty at Doral and Somerset Academy Inc. president.”

Academica also featured prominently in the 2021 Network for Public Education report “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain,” which documented examples of self-dealing, excessive management fees, and real estate arrangements involving for-profit charter operators.

And now, Academica has entered the voucher funding business.

That raises important questions.

Will charter operators affiliated with Scholarship Funding Organizations begin converting publicly funded charter schools into private schools funded primarily through vouchers administered by their affiliated SFOs?

Will private corporations like Academica eventually profit simultaneously from school management fees, real estate transactions, and voucher administration — all on the taxpayers’ dime?

Will Florida policymakers, who created this marketplace, stop to ask where all of this ultimately leads? Or where the potential for grift ends?

These are questions worth watching carefully.

While I’m on the campaign trail, I hope others will keep paying attention.

I’ll see you back here after the August election.

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“Florida students exceeded expectations. The funding did not.”

For years, Florida encouraged schools to expand Advanced Placement, dual enrollment, and career certification programs by rewarding success. Each student who passed an exam or earned an industry credential generated additional funding to support those programs. The formula was simple: when students succeeded, schools received more funding to expand opportunity.

Last year, lawmakers proposed cutting that performance funding.

Public school students, parents, and educators pushed back hard, warning that slashing incentives would undermine programs the state had spent years encouraging schools to grow.

Legislators ultimately backed away from the cuts. Instead, they replaced the existing incentive system with a new funding structure — a fixed pool of money within the Florida Education Finance Program called the Academic Acceleration Options Supplement.

The change sounded technical, but it fundamentally altered the incentive structure.

Under the old system, more student success generated more funding.

Under the new system, success is divided across a fixed pool. When more students succeed than expected, the value of each success simply gets prorated downward.

“Districts should not experience any change in funding,” said Senate PreK-12 Appropriations Chair Danny Burgess when announcing the new system.

Now that the numbers are in, we can see how that promise held up

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The Back Story → How Florida Used to Fund Academic Acceleration

For more than a decade, Florida has encouraged students to enroll in rigorous coursework and career training by creating a layered system of incentives.

Students benefited through:

• Weighted GPAs

• College credit or industry certifications

• Expanded access to college-level courses and career programs

Teachers earned bonuses when students passed exams or earned certifications.

Schools benefited because the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) provided additional funding for successful outcomes. These “add-on weights” helped districts pay for the higher costs associated with advanced coursework and career programs.

Before the 2025-26 budget changes, schools received roughly:

• $865 for each successful AP, IB, or AICE exams

• Up to $1,622 for students completing a full CTE certification program

The incentives worked.

In 2020, Governor Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran celebrated Florida’s national leadership in Advanced Placement participation, calling AP courses a “gateway to achieving success in college, career and ultimately in life.”

Career and Technical Education programs expanded as well. In February 2025, during Career and Technical Education Month, the Governor celebrated record participation, noting that more than 800,000 Florida students were enrolled in CTE programs.

The 2025-26 Funding Change

Last year’s budget replaced the open-ended add-on weights with a fixed categorical pool of funding called the Academic Acceleration Options Supplement.

For 2025-26, lawmakers allocated:

$596,771,896

Instead of each student success generating additional funding, the state now divides this fixed amount across all qualifying outcomes.

If student success exceeds projections, the value of each outcome simply gets prorated downward.

Florida students didn’t just meet expectations this year. They exceeded them.

That is exactly what happened.

Florida students exceeded the state’s projections across nearly every acceleration category:

• AP passing scores: +14% above projections

• AICE exam success: +13%

• Early graduation: +29%

• Industry certifications: +44%

Overall, the total number of acceleration outcomes ended up 20% higher than predicted.

Under the previous funding system, this surge in success would have meant more funding flowing to schools.

Under the new capped supplement, it meant the opposite.

When the January FEFP recalculation was released, student success had grown far beyond projections. But because the funding pool remained fixed, the value of each outcome dropped significantly.

Florida students achieved 131,620 acceleration outcomes — far more than projected — but the funding stayed the same.
Success increased. Funding did not.

Looking Ahead to 2026-27: More of the Same

Last year, lawmakers extended the legislative session by six weeks to resolve disagreements over the state budget and tax package. This year may follow a similar path. The House and Senate budgets are currently $1.5 billion apart, and House Speaker Daniel Perez has acknowledged that completing the budget on time is “looking tough.”

But there is one thing both chambers appear to agree on.

Neither the House nor the Senate proposes increasing funding for the Academic Acceleration Options Supplement.

Both chambers have again allocated $596,771,896 — the same amount that already proved insufficient this year.

Lawmakers now know that Florida students earned significantly more acceleration funding than was paid out.

Yet next year’s budget proposal keeps the funding flat.

The Incentive Florida Used to Have

For more than a decade, Florida’s add-on weight system worked exactly as intended.

When more students passed AP exams, schools received more funding.
When more students earned industry certifications, schools received more funding.
When districts expanded advanced coursework and career programs, the funding followed the success.

That structure created a powerful incentive: expand opportunity, and the funding will support it.

And districts responded. Advanced coursework expanded. Career programs grew. Hundreds of thousands more students gained access to college-level classes and industry certifications.

The new Academic Acceleration Options Supplement changes that dynamic.

Instead of rewarding each additional success, schools now compete for shares of a fixed pool of money. When student achievement exceeds projections, the value of each outcome simply declines.

The old system said: expand these programs — Florida will reward the results.

The new system says: expand them if you want — but the funding may not follow.

Keep the Promise to Florida’s Students

“Florida students kept their promise to succeed.
Lawmakers should keep theirs.”

Parents and students overwhelmingly support advanced academic courses and career and technical education opportunities in their public schools.

Student success should generate investment in these programs — not trigger proration.

Last year, lawmakers promised full funding.
Now lawmakers need to keep that promise.

Call Senator Danny Burgess [(850) 487-5023] and Representative Persons-Mulicka [(850) 717-5078] and ask them to ensure that student success in programs like AP, IB, dual enrollment, and career certification is rewarded — not prorated.

“If we create a great product and people come asking for it, we’ll open it to everybody.”

- Yosef Rosengarten, Director, Sunshine State Kids Foundation, to Florida State Board of Education, 2/20/26

Of course they will...

The approval of Sunshine State Kids Foundation as a Scholarship Funding Organization (SFO) for 2026 at this month’s State Board of Education meeting barely registered in the press, which has been focused on the rewrite of Schools of Hope co-location rules and the amendment of state social studies standards, to include details about the recent extradition of Nicolás Maduro. Yet I predict that this decision will be looked back on as one of the most consequential in the history of school choice in Florida.

Florida’s legislators have long sought to expand the number of SFOs beyond the dominant Step Up For Students, the politically connected nonprofit that has managed the majority of Florida’s now roughly $4–$5 billion voucher and ESA programs for more than two decades. Complaints from voucher recipients — and increasingly from private schools themselves — about delayed and inconsistent scholarship payments have become commonplace. A recent state audit found accountability and tracking problems that left substantial funding shortfalls and mismatches between funding and student enrollment. Most recently, a group of private schools filed a lawsuit alleging Step Up For Students mishandled millions in approved scholarship payments, exacerbating financial strain on schools and raising broader concerns about administration and oversight.

To the State Board, Sunshine State Kids presented itself as being focused on serving the unique scholarship needs Florida’s almost 15,000 Jewish Day School students. But, by partnering with Odyseey, Sunshine State Kids is not just another Florida nonprofit stepping into a niche space.

Odyssey is a New York–based, venture-capital-backed technology firm that has already won major contracts to administer ESA programs in multiple states, including the new Texas Education Freedom Account program. Its application materials make clear that it does not view itself as a small player: Odyssey markets itself as the only fully integrated, end-to-end ESA technology platform in the country, handling everything from eligibility verification and fund disbursement to direct vendor payments, compliance tracking, and customer service through automated systems designed to scale rapidly - all powered by artificial intelligence.

The company’s proposed phased growth strategy in Florida, establishing an initial foothold, then expanding capacity statewide in subsequent years, signals that this is about far more than adding a third scholarship funder. It is about introducing a national, technology-driven infrastructure into Florida’s voucher system, one built for rapid expansion and multi-state deployment.

Like Step Up, Odyssey has a history of using political engagement with strategic business positioning to win major public contracts. In Texas, Odyssey’s political activity - hiring key insiders, aligning with voucher promoters, and operating within a politically charged debate over ESA policy - helped it secure what many see as the industry’s “holy grail” contract.

Now, through its partnership with Sunshine State Kids, Odyssey is entering the Florida marketplace. Given its track record in other states, it would not be surprising to see the company actively engage in Florida’s political and policy landscape as it seeks to expand its footprint.

For decades, Step Up For Students has been allowed to operate as the dominant administrator of Florida’s scholarship programs. Approval of Sunshine State Kids, powered by Odyssey’s platform, creates the first serious structural competition in decades and the implications extend far beyond administration. This shift could influence:

• Who controls eligibility decisions
• How scholarship data, compliance, and auditing systems are managed
• Who governs and scales the provider marketplace
• How quickly the system expands
• How, and by whom, private student data is safeguarded

Florida’s voucher system is now one of the largest in the nation. The entity that controls its operational backbone will hold significant influence over both the direction and growth of school choice in the state going forward. That is why this decision matters, not just for Jewish Day School kids in 2026, but for the future of Florida’s ESA/scholarship ecosystem.

Other than reporting that the PreK–12 budget had been submitted to Leadership, there was no substantive discussion of 2026–2027 budget issues. That conversation is overdue.

For context, the committee’s first four meetings this session hosted presentations on the funding crisis in the 2024–25 school year, when Florida’s rapidly expanding voucher program destabilized the K–12 funding formula. Scholarship spending exceeded appropriations by roughly $400 million, resulting in a $47 million FEFP deficit and a scathing Auditor General audit.

In response, the Senate passed SB 318, a priority bill designed to address the Auditor General’s findings and prevent a repeat of the 2024–25 debacle, including the recommendation to fund vouchers in a separate FEFP categorical.

No comparable structural reforms have emerged from the House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee.

The Real Budget Issues

In my view, the most pressing questions remain:

1. Will the House follow the Auditor General’s recommendation and agree to fund vouchers in a separate silo?
The Senate has embraced this approach. The House has not.

2. How will the House address mid-year enrollment declines?
At the January 13, 2026 meeting, members were presented with data showing unexpected student population declines - particularly among English Language Learners - likely tied to recent immigration policy changes.
The new. Senate budget includes $65,263,148 for a declining enrollment supplement. The House budget contains no comparable solution.

3. How will the House address scholarship growth exceeding statutory caps in property-rich districts?
Instead of addressing the structural issues, they appear poised to kick the can down the road.

The FEFP and Funding Fairness

For more than 50 years, Florida’s Education Finance Program (FEFP) has been designed to equalize funding so that students have access to substantially similar programs and services regardless of where they live.

District funding is based on student needs and the programs in which they participate. The formula accounts for differences in property tax bases, program costs, cost of living, and population density. It has survived court challenges and is widely cited as a national model for funding fairness.

A portion of FEFP funding comes from local property taxes through the Required Local Effort (RLE).

• In “property-rich” districts, local taxpayers may generate up to 90% of their FEFP funding, with the state contributing the remaining 10%.

• In districts with lower property wealth, the state contributes a larger share.

When the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) was folded into the FEFP, it was intended to be funded with state dollars only. To safeguard districts, lawmakers capped scholarship funding in each district at 99% of its Net State FEFP (Section 1012.394(8)(a)12., F.S.).

But as voucher participation surged, Net State FEFP funding was increasingly diverted to pay for scholarships.

The impact is now being felt in property-rich districts, which rely on only a small state contribution to begin with.

The 3rd FEFP Calculation: A Breaking Point

In the recently released 2025–26 Third FEFP Calculation, scholarship funding exceeded the 99% statutory cap in five counties: Collier, Martin, Monroe, Sarasota, and Walton.

In those districts:

• Local taxpayers must still generate 100% of their Required Local Effort.

• Districts receive none of their promised Net State FEFP funding.

• Scholarship payments exceed Net State FEFP allocations by nearly $12 million collectively.

This is precisely the scenario the 99% cap was meant to prevent.

An Overlooked Risk: Voucher Funding Shrinks When Public Enrollment Drops

There is another structural problem with keeping scholarship funding inside the FEFP and tying it to a percentage of a district’s Net State FEFP.

When voucher funding is capped at 99% of a district’s Net State FEFP, the amount available for scholarships is directly tied to public school enrollment.

That means:

• If public school enrollment declines,

• Net State FEFP declines,

• The cap on scholarship funding declines with it.

This year’s Third FEFP Calculation reflected unexpected mid-year enrollment declines — particularly among English Language Learners — which reduced Net State FEFP funding in several districts. Because scholarship funding remains tied to a percentage of that shrinking base, the amount legally available for vouchers is also reduced.

In other words, when public school enrollment drops unexpectedly, the funding pool for vouchers drops as well.

This creates instability for districts and instability for scholarship families — both dependent on enrollment fluctuations neither directly controls.

A separate categorical would avoid this problem entirely:

• Public school funding would reflect public school enrollment.

• Scholarship funding would reflect scholarship participation.

• Neither would destabilize the other.

Keeping scholarships inside the FEFP does not protect districts. It does not protect voucher families. It guarantees volatility for both.

The House Response: 90:10 → 85:15

Rather than move scholarships into a separate funding silo — the structural fix recommended by the Auditor General and adopted by the Senate — the House appears to be addressing the shortfall by adjusting affected districts from a 90% local / 10% state split to an 85% local / 15% state split.

Adjusting property-rich districts from 90:10 to 85:15 may ease this year’s immediate budget pressure, but it does not address the structural flaw that created it. A separate voucher silo, by contrast, would preserve the integrity of the FEFP’s equity framework while providing predictable, transparent funding for both public schools and scholarship students.

Conclusion

The Auditor General has already warned that the current structure is unstable. The 2024–25 deficit demonstrated it. This year’s Third FEFP Calculation — combined with unexpected enrollment shifts — confirmed it.

The Senate has advanced legislation to implement the Auditor General’s recommendations and move scholarship funding into a separate categorical. The House, so far, has relied on ratio adjustments and temporary fixes — without addressing the structural imbalance at the heart of the problem.

If the goal is a funding system that is fair, predictable, and sustainable, structural reform is available. The question now is whether the House will adopt it.

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In the Florida Senate:

SB 318 (Gaetz)
Filed in response to the State Auditor General’s scathing audit of Florida’s Universal Voucher Program, SB 318 incorporates several key recommendations, including:

• Creating a separate FEFP categorical for voucher funding; and

• Assigning student ID numbers to all scholarship recipients to improve data tracking and oversight.

Defending the bill on the Senate floor, Sen. Gaetz warned:

“We cannot allow the bad stewardship and poor management of this program to continue.”
He added that ignoring the Auditor General’s findings “would be legislative malpractice.”

The bill has passed the Senate but still must clear the Florida House, where there is currently no companion bill.

SB 320 (Simon)
SB 320 continues Sen. Simon’s long-standing effort to deregulate public schools—an effort he first advanced as the sponsor of HB 1/SB 202, which ushered in universal vouchers in 2023. This year’s bill:

• Reduces regulatory requirements for school districts;

• Expands district flexibility in policymaking; and

• Streamlines financial and facilities management.

The House companion, HB 963 (Smith), has been assigned to four committees and has not yet been heard.

Meanwhile, HB 1071, an omnibus bill moving through the House, has been labeled a “related bill.” While HB 1071 touches on some of the same statutory areas as SB 320, it does not include SB 320’s administrative efficiency provisions. The overlap is thematic, not substantive. Any serious attempt at deregulation this session will require significant negotiation between chambers.

In the Florida House

HB 1071 (Trabulsy)
This sweeping omnibus bill continues to move through committees. At its most recent stop in the House Education Budget Subcommittee, Rep. Trabulsy agreed to remove language requiring school districts to cooperate with law enforcement campus visits—including K-9 units—after widespread concern that the provision would facilitate increased ICE activity in schools.

However, the bill still includes:

• A requirement for instruction on human embryologic and fetal development in grades 6–12, including a “high-definition, medically accurate ultrasound video”—language strikingly similar to the controversial “Baby Olivia”video.

• Broad restrictions related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, including prohibitions on public schools spending for:

  • Membership in organizations deemed discriminatory; and

  • Programs that violate the Florida Educational Equity Act or promote DEI, political, or social activism as defined by the State Board of Education.

The companion bill to HB1071, SB1090, carried by Sen. Grall, has not yet been heard in any of its three assigned committees.

HJR 583 – Protection of Religious Expression in Public Schools
This proposed constitutional amendment is ready for a House floor vote. It would ask voters to add language protecting students’ and staff’s religious expression in public schools, including in:

• Schoolwork,

• Clothing,

• Prayer or moments of silence, and

• Opening remarks at high school events.

During committee hearings, many religious leaders and interfaith advocates warned the measure could privilege certain beliefs, blur church–state boundaries, invite litigation, and allow religious or political ideology to enter classrooms under the guise of free expression.

The identical Senate companion, SJR 1104 (Masullo), will be heard in Senate Education PreK–12 on February 3.

Other Bills on the Move

• HB 125 / SB 194 – Designates October 14 as “Charlie Kirk Day of Remembrance.”

• HB 31 / SB 1106 – Requires official state materials, including school instructional and library materials, to replace “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria.”

• SB 420 – Requires state-supplied portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to be displayed prominently in every public school and district building. The House companion, HB371, is not moving.

• SB 1756 – Medical Freedom Act – Allows parents to exempt children from school immunization requirements based on conscience. Passed its first Senate committee.

  • The House companion, HB 917, also prohibits health care providers from discriminating based on vaccination status.

  • On January 30, First Lady Casey DeSantis and Surgeon General Joe Ladapo held a press conferencecriticizing pediatric practices that drop unvaccinated children.

• HB 1119 – Harmful to Minors – Allows challenges to library or instructional materials depicting sexual conduct and prohibits boards from considering literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Ready for a House floor vote. The Senate companion, SB1692, has not been heard. If you are concerned about book challenges and censorship, you should be following the Florida Freedom to Read

• HB 1073 / SB 1620 – Creates a “District School Board Members’ Bill of Rights,” despite school boards already being constitutional officers, with their rights to “operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district” already enshrined in the Constitution. The bill was proposed by a single school board member in Volusia County and is not supported by the Florida School Boards Association. SB 1620 also add school boards to the list of state agencies restricted from the employment of relatives—potentially limiting who can serve in districts where schools are the largest employer. SB1620 will be heard for the first time on Tuesday, 02/03/26 in Senate Education Pre-K-12 committee.

• SB 824 / HB 1147 – Requires districts with declining enrollment to identify unused land and, absent a construction contract by July 1, 2027, offer it to charter school operators. SB824 will also be heard in Tuesday’s Senate Education Pre-K-12 committee.

Rulemaking Watch

The Florida Department of Education has released proposed rule changes for Schools of Hope, addressing charter co-location on public school campuses. While DOE claims the changes clarify cost responsibility and application limits, the rule remains controversial.

The proposal is now open for feedback. You can read the rule (Proposed 6A-1.0998271) here. It will be voted on at the next State Board of Education meeting in Key West on February 20th. Until then, you can submit comments/concerns here.

This overview captures only a fraction of the education-related legislation moving through Tallahassee this session. It is by no means a comprehensive list of the bills that warrant close scrutiny, nor does it reflect the full scope of proposals that could significantly affect Florida’s public schools, students, educators, and communities. With several weeks still to go, new language, late-filed amendments, and last-minute dealmaking are all but guaranteed. Staying engaged, informed, and vocal will be essential as the legislative landscape continues to shift.

In the meantime, public education advocates should keep the pressure on. That means demanding real accountability in response to the shocking FLDOE voucher audit; supporting the Auditor General’s recommendation to move voucher funding into a separate silo, as proposed in Sen. Gaetz’s SB 318 (link); backing Sen. Simon’s common-sense deregulation bill, SB 320 (link); and insisting on guardrails for the reckless Schools of Hope charter school co-location giveaway of public school buildings.

Call and write your lawmakers. Speak up at school board meetings. Make sure they know you’re paying attention.

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And make no mistake, Tallahassee is hearing the noise.

Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas recently complained:

“Instead of embracing innovation by identifying how co-location could be beneficial to students, all I hear is complaint after complaint, protest after protest.”

Good. Keep it up.

Beware the Gaslighting

State leaders want Floridians to believe the controversy surrounding Schools of Hope, charter schools co-locating rent-free inside traditional public schools, is overblown. They frame it as nothing more than another “choice” for families trapped in failing schools.

State Board of Education Vice Chair Esther Byrd went even further, declaring:

“Schools of Hope wouldn’t be necessary if our public school system had done its job along the way.”

This is classic gaslighting.

Schools of Hope was not an organic reform. It was a scheme dreamed up in 2017 by then-Speaker Richard Corcoran to lure out-of-state corporate charter chains to Florida. Last session, lawmakers amended the law to allow “Hope Operators” to co-locate in underutilized public schools, rent free.

The catch? Host public schools must absorb all operational costs for the charter students, including transportation, security, maintenance, food service, and more. This is the opposite of “money follows the child.” Here, public school students subsidize the care and feeding of their charter school neighbors.

From the start, it was well known that the co-location bill was written expressly for New York’s Success Academy. Success Academy helped write the bill, while a Miami billionaire poured money into lobbying efforts to ensure its passage. The bill became a legislative priority for both Governor DeSantis and Speaker Daniel Perez, perhaps the only thing they agreed on last session. The legislation was never heard in the Senate. Instead, it was quietly inserted into the budget at the last minute and rushed into law. Over the summer, the Florida Department of Education fast-tracked rulemaking and adopted a “first come, first served” approach that triggered a feeding frenzy.

By fall, nearly 700 co-location requests targeted almost 500 public schools across at least 22 districts, yet only about 60 of those schools were persistently low-performing.

The Sales Pitch and the Reality

In a November 30 op-ed, Commissioner Kamoutsas defended the policy, claiming co-location would deliver “educational excellence and fiscal responsibility.” He argued that shared campuses reduce waste and improve efficiency.

Except they don’t, because while resources are shared, costs are not.

A week later, at the FSBA Annual Joint Conference, Kamoutsas told conservative school board members to fall in line. Support for Schools of Hope, he implied, is now a loyalty test. He accused districts of hiding behind “technicalities,” threatened to send state cost-cutting teams into districts, and floated the idea of shutting down entire school systems that failed to perform. He also promised that despite the flood of applications, only a handful of Schools of Hope would actually co-locate in 2027–28. That reassurance quickly became the official talking point.

On December 10, Governor DeSantis echoed it at an Orlando press conference, openly naming Success Academy as his preferred operator. He reassured Floridians that “most people” wouldn’t notice any impact, because these schools would be placed in struggling neighborhoods “where most people would never go.” Wealthier communities, he said, would be spared.

He even suggested co-location would relieve districts of the “burden” of educating certain students.

Let’s be clear. Districts would be relieved of funding, not responsibility. Taxpayers statewide would still foot the bill for the charter school giveaway, whether they live in a neighborhood DeSantis would feel comfortable visiting, or not.

“Much Ado About Nothing”?

Vice Chair Byrd took to social media to dismiss the backlash as “much ado about nothing,” accusing “education cartels,” liberal interests, and even conservative school board members of spreading misinformation. Ironically, some of the most critical responses came from conservative board members in her own district, who called the law poorly written and dangerously rushed.

Even Jeb Bush, Florida’s original champion of charter expansion, weighed in, writing two Miami Herald op-eds (here and here). In both, he praised Schools of Hope as bold and innovative, emphasizing that school buildings belong to taxpayers, not districts. What he failed to mention, again, was the complete lack of cost sharing and the diversion of public funding to corporate entities.

Why This Matters

Schools of Hope co-location shifts costs, concentrates disruption in vulnerable communities, and strips local school boards of authority, all while insulating the neighborhoods and families with the most resources. That’s not innovation. It’s the extraction of resources from public schools for the benefit of charter corporations.

Floridians should demand better. Lawmakers must pause implementation, fix the law, require true cost sharing, and restore transparency and local control. School board members, conservative and progressive alike, should continue to speak up, despite the pressure to stay quiet.

And citizens must keep doing exactly what Commissioner Kamoutsas dislikes most: complaining, protesting, questioning, and refusing to be gaslit.

Accountabaloney may be briefly off the grid, but this fight is not. I’ll be back in mid-January, ready to rejoin it, and to hold Florida’s leaders accountable for what happens next.

P.S. Happy New Year

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason. It could be the “woke” or the book-banning regions. It might be he’s blinded by private-school light. It could be, perhaps, his dogma’s too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all, was his goal of privatizing public schools’ fall.

Whatever the reason, his dogma or views, He stood there on Sunday, hating the Whos. Staring down from his tower with a sour, Grinchy frown, at the bright painted classrooms all over the town. “They love learning!” he snarled, with a sneer and a hiss,“Tomorrow is Monday! I must stop all of this!”

Then he growled, with a plan that was dark and conniving, “I MUST find some way to keep public schools from thriving! But how?” Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!

“I know just what to do!” the Grinch hissed with a grin, “I’ll open the doors and let the great grift begin! I’ll call it a ‘Scholarship!’ I’ll call it ‘School Choice!’ While I gut public funding and silence their voice!”

He logged onto X with his Nastygram laws, and he paused for a moment to sharpen his claws. “I’ll take all their tax-base! I’ll take every cent! I’ll let charters collocate without paying rent!”

“I’ll squeeze out the classrooms! I’ll crowd out the halls! Until ‘Public’ is nothing but four empty walls! I’ll marketize music! I’ll monetize art! I’ll break every public-run schoolhouse’s heart!

And when they are struggling and failing to thrive, I’ll say, ‘Only the Private are meant to survive!’”

Brief Interlude (To be sung with a deep, gravelly sneer)

You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch, You’re a grifter in a tie. You peddle “Schools of Hope” nonsense, while you let the public die. Mr. Grinch!

Your soul is an appalling dump-heap, overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of culture-war censorship, corporate cronyism, and jaw-dropping voucher audits imaginable, mangled up in tangled-up, Nastygrammed spin!

The Optimistic Finale

Then he paused. And the Grinch put a hand to his ear. And he did hear a sound rising loud, rising clear. It started in Duval. It started in Dade. From the Keys to the Panhandle’s pine-covered shade. It wasn’t a cry! It wasn’t a moan! It wasn’t the sound of a school left alone!

He stared down at Florida! The Grinch popped his eyes! Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise! Every Who down in Florida, the tall and the small, was standing in circles to guard every wall! They gathered with posters! They gathered with pride! With parents and teachers all stood side-by-side!

He hadn’t stopped thriving! It came just the same! It came despite vouchers and big corporate names! And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the sand, Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How can they still stand?”

“It came without lobbyist kickbacks or fees! It came despite Nastygrams, X’s, and decrees! They’re protecting the library! Protecting the halls! They’re answering each public school’s calls!”

And he puzzled for hours, till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! “Maybe schooling shouldn’t be sold in a mall. Maybe public education... is worth fighting for, after all!”

But he didn’t join in. No, he didn’t grow kind. He just stood there defeated with his small, narrow mind. For the “Choice” he had offered was a hollow-shell lie, for the Public chose Public—which no money should buy. He slunk to his office, his power was gone, while Who public school students kept learning right on.

With apologies to the great Dr. Seuss.

I saw this image today, and it prompted me to take a closer look at the numbers for my Florida school district: Monroe County.

SURPRISE! Here is the state funding breakdown for Monroe:

Monroe’s 8,457 Public School students (district and charter) receive $181.86 each from the state (for a total of $1,537,924).

• While Monroe’s 743 Family Empowerment Scholarship voucher recipients receive $6,786.03 each from the state (for a total of $5,040,326).

What if that $5,040,326 was used to fund Monroe’s public school students instead? Per pupil funding would be nearly $600 more per pupil, which could translate into teacher raises of $8,000/year or a reduction in class sizes, expanded electives, richer learning experiences, or some combination of all of the above - all of which could directly improve classrooms and student learning.

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The Rest of the Story:

The Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP) is the state’s primary funding formula for K–12 public schools. It is funded through a combination of state revenue and local property taxes. In districts that are “property rich,” like Monroe, local property owners are asked to generate as much as 90% of their district’s FEFP funding (with the State chipping in the rest). In districts with lower property tax bases, the State contributes a larger percentage of the FEFP. The formula’s goal is equitable funding and the formula, though complex, has withstood court challenges, earns high marks and is often cited as a national model for funding equity.

Since 2019, Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) vouchers have been funded through the FEFP. In 2023, when HB 1 made vouchers universal, the cost of those vouchers - and their impact on public-school funding - skyrocketed. The cost of universal school vouchers in Florida has broken its K-12 funding formula and, as shown in the recent “Whatever Could Go Wrong, Has Gone Wrong“ audit, bankrupted the K–12 funding formula in 2024–25, resulting in a $47 million deficit.

Here are the numbers for Monroe:

According to the 2025–26 FEFP Second Calculation, Monroe County is funded for a total of 9,199.69 students (the decimal reflects part-time enrollment).

• 8,456.94 students attend public schools (district-managed or charter)

• 742.75 students receive publicly funded FES vouchers

Total FEFP funding for Monroe is $121,138,651, of which the Net State FEFP is $6,578,250.

• Total FEFP funding (Monroe): $121,138,651

• Net State FEFP: $6,578,250

In Monroe County, nearly all of the Net State FEFP is consumed by funding for voucher students, while public-school students are funded almost entirely by local property taxes.

• 742.75 FES voucher students:

  • State funding: $5,040,326.00

  • Per-student state funding: $6,786.03

• 8,456.94 Public school students:

  • State funding: $1,537,924.00

  • Per-student state funding: $181.86

Although voucher students represent only about 8% of the Monroe students funded through the FEFP, they receive more than three-quarters of the state portion of FEFP dollars. Meanwhile, the remaining 92% of students in public schools are funded almost entirely by local taxpayers, with minimal state support.

What it would look like if 100% of the Net State FEFP were spent on Monroe’s public school students instead of vouchers?

• Net State FEFP: $6,578,250

• Public school students (district + charter): 8,456.94

• $6,578,250÷8,456.94 ≈ $777.90 per public school student (almost $600 more!)

Currently, Monroe’s public school students receive less than one-quarter of the state funding they would receive if voucher students were not drawing from the Net State FEFP. Instead, the vast majority of state dollars are concentrated on a relatively small number of FES voucher students, leaving local property taxpayers to shoulder almost the entire cost of educating the remaining 92% of students. The funding exists — it’s just being redirected away from public schools.

[It is also important to note that most voucher recipients were never enrolled in public schools to begin with. Universal vouchers have largely subsidized students already homeschooling or attending private schools, often at significant public expense and with far less accountability.)

The state dollars currently absorbed by voucher students in Monroe County are large enough to fund meaningful, across-the-board teacher raises, or significant classroom or instructional enhancements - without raising local property taxes.

Florida has the resources to meaningfully invest in public education but those resources are being diverted elsewhere. Monroe County is not an outlier; the same calculation can be made across Florida, with the same result. This is not a funding problem. It is a policy choice.

Want to do the calculation for your Florida District?

The 2nd Calculation FEFP is here.

• Total Student Population (K-12 Unweighted FTE Students) is on page 2.

• Net State FEFP is on page 6.

• Adjusted Net State FEFP is on page 7. (this is how much your public schools get, subtract this from Net State FEFP to determine how much the state is funding vouchers in your district)

• Grand Total Family Empowerment Scholarship students is on page 13.

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Hundreds of millions were misspent. As USA Today reported:

“The amount of money we cannot account for as being in the right place at the right time exceeds $270 million on any given day.“ – USA Today

This was very much on the minds of Florida’s school board members as they gathered in Tampa for the 2025 FSBA/FADSS Annual Joint Conference.

During a planned networking luncheon and awards ceremony on Thursday, attendees were surprised by an unannounced speaker: Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas.

SPOILER ALERT: He did not address how his Department plans to respond to the devastating audit findings.

Kamoutsas’ surprise visit marked his first appearance before the Florida School Boards Association since his appointment in June 2025. He could have used the opportunity to introduce himself to more than 400 attendees, outline his vision for Florida’s schools, reassure members that the audit findings were being taken seriously, or, at minimum, show respect for the state’s locally elected education leaders.

Instead, he chose a different tactic—the proverbial skunk at the garden party.

You may have already heard about the booing. Here is the rest of what happened.

Kamoutsas opened combatively, announcing he was there to discuss “the elephant in the room”: the newly expanded Schools of Hope law, which allows select corporate charter chains to occupy underutilized public school buildings at no cost. Under the law, districts must also absorb all additional expenses—transportation, security, utilities, and more.

Rather than acknowledge the law’s very real fiscal impacts, he chastised the audience:

“Co-location of Schools of Hope in district buildings is only scary when adults prioritize entrenched systems over chasing the best possible student outcomes.”

He followed with a politicized retelling of the history of school choice, claiming critics had long predicted doom—defunding, dismantling, privatization—but, in his narrative, none of this had happened. Florida’s public schools, he said, were better than ever. As evidence, he offered a selective set of progress-monitoring data and declared:

“Because of school choice, student performance increased… competition leads to better results, and everybody wins.”

So much winning...

Kamoutsas dismissed legitimate concerns about Schools of Hope co-location and accused critics of refusing to “embrace innovation,” saying all he hears is “complaint after complaint, protest after protest.”

He was particularly irritated by “complaints” from DeSantis-endorsed school board members, questioning their leadership if they did not support co-location “even when it’s politically inconvenient.” Apparently, “strong leadership” means following whatever the Governor and his appointees demand.

He insisted that co-location was “efficient, effective, and unquestionably pro-student,” and that taxpayers should not have to fund “multiple school buildings… just because some adults don’t like sharing space.”
(Meanwhile, districts are expected to pay for the privilege—and, frankly, nobody likes a freeloader.)

He dismissed concerns about for-profit charter companies benefiting from co-location as “nothing more than a union talking point,” insisting:

“Every School of Hope operator is a nonprofit organization… It cannot be a for-profit company.”

What he omitted: though their charters are technically nonprofit entities, every Schools of Hope chain operates under a large, lucrative for-profit management company—a distinction that matters deeply when public assets are at stake.

Kamoutsas then criticized districts for celebrating their lack of failing “D” or “F” schools, claiming, “Everyone in the room knows that is not reality.” He accused districts of hiding low performance behind “technicalities,” which he said justified changing the definition of low-performing schools to benefit School of Hope. He claimed the growth of vouchers and homeschooling was “proof” that public schools were failing—even though the vast majority of those students were never enrolled in public schools, which remain the most popular choice in Florida.

He used these claims to justify forced co-location:

“Why should we reward school districts with low-performing schools and mismanagement by leadership… by allowing them to split costs of co-location with high-performing charter programs?”

So why not let Schools of Hope operators get everything for free?

Kamoutsas escalated further, announcing he planned to call out districts with the most underutilized space and send the CFO’s DOGE team to “help” them cut costs.

He argued that Schools of Hope operators outperform districts and reminded the audience that charters can be closed for poor performance—before lamenting that the state could not currently shut down entire districts: “Maybe we can talk about that with the Legislature this session.”

This is the moment when the audience, understandably, began to boo.
He had to beg to be allowed to finish.

He, then, took a swipe at Academica/Mater Academy for submitting hundreds of co-location notices, claiming hope operators had committed to only “a handful” of sites for 2027–28 and blaming “some chicanery” for the flood of applications.

But the truth is straightforward:

• That rule was written by his department and approved by his State Board.

• There is no cap—in law or rule—on the number of schools a Hope operator may apply to occupy.

• The FLDOE’s own administrative rule, not statute, created the first-come, first-served stampede.

Kamoutsas closed by warning that he expects districts to “innovate” and will hold systems “publicly, transparently, and relentlessly” accountable—“even if that makes people uncomfortable.”

He certainly achieved that.

But accountability, it seems, is reserved only for school districts—not the real elephant in the room: the bureaucrats and the Scholarship Funding Organization responsible for the FEFP audit failures and the daily mismanagement of hundreds of millions in public dollars.

Rather than use his first appearance before Florida’s local education leaders to build bridges, Commissioner Kamoutsas chose to scold, threaten, and deflect responsibility for his own department’s shortcomings.

The message was clear:
He expects superintendents and school board members to stop raising concerns and fall in line—even as the forced co-location of Schools of Hope operators generates escalating backlash across the state.

Florida’s public education system deserves transparency, collaboration, and genuine accountability - or at the very least, a modicum of respect.
Instead, it got a performance designed to intimidate rather than lead.

After his “performance,” Kamoutsas responded to a Tampa Bay Times report on his presentation, claiming he was booed for “suggesting accountability for school districts that fail students.”

What he left out, of course, is that he still has not taken responsibility for the catastrophic voucher audit under his own department’s watch—an audit documenting hundreds of millions misspent, systemic breakdowns, and a funding formula driven into deficit. Accountability, it seems, applies only to others.

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Next week I am attending the Annual Joint Conference of the Florida School Boards Association (FSBA) and the Florida Association of District School Superintendents (FADSS). This year’s theme is “FUTURE FOCUSED: Navigating the New Frontier.” There will be panel discussions with Google and Code.org, and multiple breakout sessions on the challenges of implementing AI.

Will any sessions focus on not implementing AI? I doubt it.

The excitement surrounding AI in education confuses me. We are just emerging from a nationwide experiment in virtual learning — the pandemic — which made it abundantly clear that most students thrive with teachers in classrooms, not on screens. We are also in the midst of a student mental health crisis in which digital social media is a major culprit. School districts are being urged to ban cell phones. Parents are begging for less screen time, concerned about its effects on learning, social development, health, and well-being.

So why does anyone believe that more screens — now with AI — will improve K–12 education?

AI will not revolutionize education

Last summer, a Have You Heard podcast episode called “Don’t Buy the AI Hype” introduced me to the work of Ben Riley, a cognitive scientist and founder of Cognitive Resonance. His organization helps people understand how generative AI works, what it can and cannot do, and how to make informed decisions about its use. Its tagline is fitting: “Building Human Knowledge to Halt AI Hype.”

Riley’s presentation at the 2025 ASU+GSV Summit — the largest gathering of ed-tech investment and AI hype in the world, the same event where Secretary of Education Lynda McMahon repeatedly referred to AI as “A-1” — was titled “AI Will Not Revolutionize Education.” It is well worth watching. Riley explains what AI actually is and why claims of “transformation” far outpace the evidence. The current research base showing AI improves learning outcomes at scale is weak. He warns that hallucinations make AI a risky tutoring tool and that rapid adoption could widen existing inequities.

Riley emphasizes that the pressure to “keep up” can push districts toward hasty adoption without sound pedagogy, infrastructure, or evidence. Instead of chasing a transformational narrative, he urges schools to prioritize teacher expertise, human relationships, and solid instruction — treating AI as a tool, not a replacement.

[The fear of being left behind appears to be driving FSBA’s “Future Focused” agenda.]

The same Have You Heard podcast reintroduced me to Audrey Watters, a writer who examines the intersection of education, technology, and politics. She notes that for generations, education technology has promised big and delivered little — and AI will be no different. She also highlights the connections between tech billionaires pushing AI and those pushing privatization and dismantling of public education.

Watter’s blog, “Second Breakfast,” — particularly the piece “LLM as MLM,”— led me to read Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s book The AI Con. The book teaches the reader to identify the AI Hype and not fall for the con. They write:

“Artificial intelligence, if we’re being frank, is a con, a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets. A few major well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.”

In education, the “productivity” pitch translates into fewer teachers, more automation, and algorithm-driven learning — not better outcomes. Public schools are the “quality service” that will replaced with chat bots and other “artificial facsimiles.”

Attempting to hear “the other side”

Concerned I was only hearing one side, I enrolled in an eight-week certification course at the University of North Florida called “AI for Work and Life.” It promised foundational understanding and hands-on experience with AI. We learned how easy it is to generate low-quality (crappy) videos. One session discussed ethical concerns — privacy, equity, copyright — but deliberately avoided the environmental impacts of data centers, instead imagining that AI might solve those very problems. (They were also upbeat about AI’s ability to solve poverty.) For the record, I am now certified — but not convinced.

I also requested a demonstration of the chatbots being piloted in my district. I was shown how Khan Academy’s Khanmigo can help students prepare for the SAT. Before using it, students must acknowledge that the chatbot “doesn’t always tell you the truth.” I wondered aloud: Why would we hire a tutor that admits it lies? No one wants that.

In September, I attended a mini-conference for school board members and district staff, sponsored largely by ed-tech vendors. Speakers encouraged us to advocate for state and federal funding for the data centers needed to support the “AI revolution.” At one point, we were asked to brainstorm what budget cuts could fund these tools. Fewer books? Larger class sizes?

Instead of asking how to fund AI, what we should be asking:

What are the benefits of not adopting AI in the classroom?
If money were no object, would we invest in books and teachers — or in AI-driven data collection and ed-tech products?

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis has announced plans to regulate artificial intelligence, citing concern about its rapid expansion and potential impacts, particularly in education. The Florida Citizens Alliance — architects of Florida’s book ban laws — is preparing to push for guardrails including parental opt-ins, strict data controls, and policies requiring districts to contract only with AI providers who embrace a “Western civilization (biblical) worldview.” [Ah... Floriduh...)

At the same time, tech companies are pouring billions into AI chips and data centers while financial analysts warn of an AI bubble. The recent stock market rally has been fueled almost entirely by the biggest tech firms. If the market experiences a correction similar to the dot-com collapse, the consequences could be global.

So what is a Florida school board member to do?

First: stop listening to tech giants/broligarchs insisting that AI will revolutionize education. Remember that education is fundamentally a human endeavor. Focus on connecting students with great teachers. If AI truly is the future, districts can adopt it later — after solid evidence, proven pedagogy, and meaningful guardrails exist.

Policy making around responsible use of AI will certainly be necessary. But that is different from embracing AI as the next great educational transformation.

Above all: be a skeptic. Ask good questions. Recognize the hype.

As we navigate AI’s expansion, our charge is simple: protect the relationships that make learning possible. Every policy, every pilot, every tool we introduce should answer one question — does this help students and teachers connect more deeply, or does it get in the way? By keeping human connection at the center, we ensure that technology serves education, not the other way around.

ADDENDUM:

Here are some questions I hope will be addresses during the upcoming FSBA AJC:

1. Evidence & Outcomes

• What independent, peer-reviewed evidence demonstrates that AI improves learning outcomes for K–12 students at scale?

• Has any AI tool been shown to outperform high-quality teaching by humans? If not, why invest district funds?

2. Pedagogy & Human Relationships

• How does this AI tool strengthen — not weaken — teacher–student relationships?

• What tasks does AI replace, and which human interactions does it reduce?

• If AI is tutoring or giving feedback, who is responsible for the accuracy, quality, and appropriateness of that instruction?

3. Accuracy, Hallucinations & Safety

• What liability exists if an AI tool gives harmful, biased, or misleading advice? Who is accountable — the district, the vendor, or the teacher?

• Why is using a product that admits it fabricates answers better that hiring an honest human?

4. Privacy, Data & Surveillance

• What student data is being collected, stored, or inferred by the AI system?

• Does any of this data leave the district? Is it used to train commercial models?

• How long is the data retained, and can families opt out of data collection?

5. Costs, Contracts & Sustainability

• What is the true total cost of ownership — including training, infrastructure, data storage, and recurring licensing?

• What budget cuts will be required to fund AI adoption? Books? Teachers? Support staff?

• If the AI bubble bursts or the vendor collapses, what happens to districts locked into multi-year contracts?

• Does adopting this tool require expanding our district’s data-center footprint, electricity usage, or cooling capacity? At what cost?

6. Equity & Unintended Consequences

• How does AI improve equity rather than widen existing gaps between students with and without support at home?

• What populations are most likely to be harmed by algorithmic bias or error?

• Could AI be used to justify larger class sizes or fewer teachers? If so, how will this impact vulnerable students?

7. Screen Time & Development

• How does increasing AI usage align with parent concerns about excessive screen time?

• What evidence suggests more digital tools will improve — rather than undermine — social development and mental health?

8. Environmental Impact

• What is the estimated carbon footprint or water demand associated with the AI tools being promoted for classroom use?

• Is this an ethical use of public school resources during a climate and infrastructure crisis?

9. Hype vs. Reality

• What can this tool actually do today — not what it might do “in the future”?

• How do we avoid making expensive decisions based on fear of being “left behind”?

10. Opportunity Cost — the most important questions of all

• If money were no object, would we rather invest in outstanding teachers and high-quality learning materials, or in AI-driven products?

• What will we lose — pedagogically and socially — by replacing human learning experiences with algorithmic ones?

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The Fourth Calculation still has not been released. But last week, the Auditor General’s report — 2024-25 School Year Funding Accountability Challenges — confirmed what many suspected: massive, systemic failures at both Step Up For Students (SUFS), the state’s primary “nonprofit” Scholarship Funding Organization, and the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE). The mismanagement produced a $47 million deficit in the 2024–25 K–12 education budget.

Following the Auditor General’s jaw-dropping presentation on 11/19/25, Senator Don Gaetz filed SB 318, “Educational Scholarship Programs,” describing it as an attempt to “re-engineer” the voucher system to address the audit’s findings and “safeguard school choice and parental empowerment.”

SB 318 was filed on 11/21/25 and is co-sponsored by Senators Simon, Burgess, and Pizzo. Notably, its only committee reference is Senate Appropriations — highly unusual for a bill of this magnitude, which bypasses all education committees. At present, there is no House companion bill.

How SB 318 compares to last year’s SB 7030

Like last year’s SB 7030 (also carried by Senator Gaetz), which passed the Senate but died in Conference, SB 318 would:

• Move the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) into a separate categorical within the FEFP, funded by the General Appropriations Act.

• Expand use of the Educational Stabilization Fund to backfill enrollment changes for districts and guarantee scholarship funding.

• Shift scholarship payments from quarterly to monthly.

• Assign state student ID numbers to all scholarship recipients.

• Standardize fall and spring application windows and require families to verify eligibility before each payment.

• Require an annual FTE audit of scholarship programs , with SFOs required to return misallocated funds (as is required of districts).

What SB 318 adds this year

SB 318 includes additional fiscal guardrails and structural changes, such as:

• Establishing a $250 million minimum balance for the Educational Stabilization Fund.

• Expanding FLDOE authority for data reconciliation and financial oversight.

• Tightening requirements for how stabilization funds are released.

• Restoring the name “McKay-Gardiner Scholarship” to the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Unique Abilities (FES-UA).

• Standardizing authorized purchases among scholarships to include digital devices for homeschooled PEP students.

• Requiring homeschooled voucher users enrolled in Florida Virtual School to pay tuition/fees first, just as private school families must, before accessing additional funds.

Homeschool voucher families will welcome expanded access to digital devices but may resist the shift to monthly payments. SB 318 defines “curriculum” as “a complete course of study,” which often requires up-front purchases that are difficult to make on monthly disbursements.

What advocates have long called for — and what SB 318 finally includes

There is genuine merit in several reforms — many of which public education advocates have requested for years :

• Assigning official student ID numbers to all funded students

• Requiring eligibility verification before payments

• Establishing application windows

• Conducting annual FTE audits

These should have been in place before lawmakers expanded vouchers universally.

The bill’s central — and most important — change

Senator Gaetz emphasized what he calls the audit’s top recommendation:
Separating voucher funding from district funding in the FEFP.

As he explained:

“The architecture of our current funding system has scrambled together the funds for public schools, private schools, home schooling, and unique ability scholarships — and then the Department and the SFOs have to unscramble upwards of $4 billion.
No wonder there are problems.”

Separating these funding streams will improve transparency and prevent unpredicted voucher growth from destabilizing district budgets. It will also make clear — perhaps uncomfortably so for some lawmakers — the extent to which voucher expansion has been subsidized at the expense of public schools.

The House immediately pushed back

Just hours after Gaetz emphasized the need to follow the Auditor General’s recommendations, the Florida House rejected the idea.

After receiving the same audit presentation, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, Chair of the House PreK–12 Budget Subcommittee, declared that separating voucher and district funds would be “a huge mistake” that would “end universal school choice.”

Her concern is not fiscal responsibility but political vulnerability:

“If vouchers are moved to their own pot, trust me, there will be a cap, and those funds will be targeted.”

It’s worth noting:
The Auditor General examined tracking of voucher funds, not how those dollars were spent — on everything from Christmas gifts (LEGOs, bicycles, American Girl dolls), to theme parks, to kitchen appliances, to “Flat Earth” curriculum.
Someone should probably audit that, too.

To date, the House has filed no bill addressing the audit findings, though the PreK–12 Budget Subcommittee held four meetings on the topic during committee weeks.

What comes next

The 2025 Legislative Session begins January 13.
This will be a major issue — and one that will reveal whether lawmakers intend to fix the problems the audit exposed or preserve the very system that caused them.

Addendum: While I was writing this, The Foundation for Florida’s Future issued the following statement in response to the filing of SB318:

“The Foundation appreciates Sen. Gaetz’s interest in ensuring the nation’s largest parental choice program works better for the half a million families that utilize it and the districts that are impacted by families making different decisions.

The administration of the program has not been perfect, and there’s plenty of room for improvement, but layering new, additional parental requirements will not solve what is ultimately a student tracking problem. Upgraded technology and unified data reporting standards like those used in Texas and Indiana are the best solutions to this.

We look forward to working with Sen. Gaetz, Chairman Burgess and Chairwoman Jenna Persons-Mulicka to modernize the state’s student tracking infrastructure and data reporting standards while protecting families who utilize the state’s scholarship programs.”

Corporate charter chains are lining up to collocate in our public schools. “Schools of Hope” charter operators are scrambling to be the first to collocate in underutilized district-managed schools. Language, slipped into the June budget conforming bill, quietly redefined “persistently low-performing school” to include even ‘A’-rated schools, giving eligible charter chains the right to move in rent-free while districts cover essentials like food service and transportation. More than 600 public schools have been targeted so far, including brand-new schools deemed “under-enrolled” simply because they haven’t opened yet.

Voucher audit exposes massive financial failures. Public education advocates across Florida are saying, “We told you so.” House and Senate appropriations committees were briefed on the Auditor General’s report, 2024-25 School Year Funding Accountability Challenges, which found that Florida’s universal voucher system effectively bankrupted the K–12 funding formula, creating a $47 million deficit. With the FLDOE relying on voluntary surveys to determine where students actually were, the audit details failures “at every level.” In summary: “Whatever could go wrong, has gone wrong.” Hundreds of millions were misspent. As USA Today reported on 11/19/25:

“The amount of money we cannot account for as being in the right place at the right time exceeds $270 million on any given day.“ - USA Today

State Board of Education:
The 11/13/25 FLBOE meeting made one thing clear: Florida’s highest education policymakers are NOT focused on the needs of our public school students. Chair Ryan Petty opened by celebrating “School Choice” and referring to public schools as merely “the default option” — a clear illustration of the Board’s diminished regard for the system that continues to serve the vast majority of Florida students.

Other troubling moments included:

•The Phoenix Declaration.
The State Board proudly made Florida the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration, calling it a set of “common-sense” principles all Floridians can support. Yet barely an hour later, Vice Chair Esther Byrd stated that the next step, following adoption, would be to convert all Florida public schools to a classical education model (something that all Floridians certainly do not want).

• Claims of “communism in our schools.”
Board member Layla Collins—wife of the current Lt. Governor and possible gubernatorial candidate—warned that “socialism and communism [are] penetrating every avenue of our life and every aspect of our child’s education,” and believed God placed her on the board to fight against this intrusion.
The next day, she tweeted a Washington Times article blaming teachers’ unions and “the radical left” for infiltrating “government schools” and turning children into agents of a socialist agenda. The proposed solution? Publicly funded private “school choice,” naturally.

• Overreach and erosion of local control. Board member Daniel Foganholi focused less on communism and more on expanding state authority. He wants the state to help local school boards make “the hard decisions” regarding local public school facilities by advising them on which schools should be closed or consolidated. He seemed to believe that funds raised by selling a school building could be used to increase teacher salaries. Will local communties welcome Tallahassee’s input into the closure of their schools?

And finally, the Inquisition of Alachua School Board Vice Chair, Tina Certain.

Summoned before the FLBOE over a Facebook comment she made about the late Charlie Kirk’s televised, political rally–styled memorial service, Certain refused to “canonize” Kirk and firmly defended her First Amendment right to free expression. When board members questioned her ability to lead and suggested her remarks were unbecoming of a public official, she responded by defending her record, her integrity, and her good name.

Her attorney, Gary Edinger, reminded the Board in a letter sent prior to the meeting that her appearance was entirely voluntary, noting: “The Board of Education does not have the authority to compel Ms. Certain’s attendance at the November 13 meeting. The Board lacks the power to issue subpoenas and is not authorized by statute to conduct investigations or adjudicate offenses.”

When Certain stood up to this board accustomed to watching people cower, people noticed. Many people noticed.

In a recent Tampa Bay Times column, John Hill asked: “In Florida school wars, are locals finally pushing back?”
He wrote:

“I don’t know when Floridians are going to take back their local schools and demand that political apparatchiks in Tallahassee stay in their lane... But if you had to timestamp the moment the tide started to change, it may have been Nov. 13, at a meeting of the state Board of Education, when Tina Certain told the board, in no uncertain terms, to get lost.”

Hill observed that despite the state’s fixation on culture wars and imagined indoctrination, “Floridians value their public schools and see them as symbols of neighborhood pride.” Indeed, voters across the state have repeatedly approved tax increases to support teacher pay, school safety, and high-quality educational opportunities.

And while the State Board clutches its pearls over Certain’s choice of t-shirt, school districts are actively pushing back against the Schools of Hope taxpayer giveaway to corporate charter chains — and the Auditor General has now issued a report openly questioning whether the Department of Education, which they govern, is even capable of doing their job.

Is the tide starting to change? Will fiscal conservatives step in to rein in the rampant, unaccountable voucher spending? Are school districts now feeling threatened enough to push back against corporate charter cronyism? Are school board members ready to stand up and demand what is necessary to provide high-quality public schools for all children? And are communities engaged enough — and fed up enough — to protect and defend the local public schools that have served generations?

The answers to those questions will determine the future of public education in Florida. The pressure is building. The failures are impossible to ignore. And the pushback is beginning. The question now is whether Floridians are ready to turn that momentum into real action — and reclaim their schools before it’s too late.

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Next week, Florida’s appointed Commissioner of Education and his ideologically aligned State Board of Education will vote to “ratify and adopt” The Phoenix Declaration — the Heritage Foundation’s “Vision for Education.” The move cements Florida’s march toward a full ideological takeover of its public schools.

This should come as no surprise.

In August, newly appointed Board Chair Ryan Petty, in his very first action, proposed adopting The Phoenix Declarationas “a framework for our work here as members of the Florida State Board of Education.” He told his colleagues, “We live in a time of moral and political crises when too many schools have lost their way. But this moment of challenge is also a moment of opportunity.”

If approved, Florida will become the first state to formally sign on to the Declaration. At this point, the Board might as well wear Heritage Foundation patches on their uniforms.

Both Petty and former Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. are listed among the Declaration’s signatories, alongside organizations such as The 1776 Project Foundation, United States Christian Education Network, Center for Christian Virtue, and individuals from Moms for Liberty, PragerU, and others. It reads like a who’s who of far-right education influencers — from privatization advocates like Erika Donalds and Corey DeAngelis (a contributor to Project 2025) to Christian nationalists such as Scott Yenor of Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) and the Claremont Institute.

On the surface, The Phoenix Declaration sounds relatively harmless. Like Petty, it opens with the claim that America faces “moral and political crises” in education, asserting that schools have “lost their way.” It outlines broad, feel-good principles — “parental choice,” “objective truth,” “character formation,” “cultural transmission,” and “citizenship” — all framed in the language of virtue and tradition.

But beneath that polished rhetoric lies a clear ideological agenda.

As edublogger/writer Peter Greene observed:

“The Phoenix Declaration is artfully done... much of it uses broad enough terms that everyone can agree with what it says even as they totally disagree about what it means. It blows its anti-woke dog whistle hard enough to awaken the oldest, deafest labrador... But mostly it assumes that all reasonable Americans see it this way, and while it name checks ‘civil disagreement’ at one point, it doesn’t particularly embrace pluralism or diversity as American virtues and values.”

Still think this is just a harmless framework? Consider Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ own words when unveiling the plan:

“For too long, education freedom advocates have been on defense, constantly reacting to the radical Left’s latest ideological assault. It’s time to go on offense. School leaders, educators, school board members, and policymakers need a set of shared, unshakable principles to reclaim education and put students — not leftist activism — first.”

In other words, Heritage is explicitly positioning the Phoenix Declaration as part of a political campaign to “reclaim” education — not a neutral statement of values.

Historian Tad Stoermer has described it as “a sophisticated rebranding of culture-war politics — using lofty rhetoric about virtue and excellence to conceal an authoritarian, nationalist agenda aimed at censoring diverse histories and undermining public education.”

He identifies five key dangers:

• Ideological Control Disguised as Reform – It hides a political agenda behind the language of “excellence” and “virtue.”

• Rewriting and Sanitizing History – It promotes a selective, patriotic version of U.S. history that erases uncomfortable truths.

• Patriotism as Indoctrination – It replaces informed citizenship with unquestioning nationalism.

• The “Parental Rights” Trojan Horse – It uses parental choice as a cover for censorship and defunding public schools.

• The Myth of Objective Truth – It defines “truth” through ideology, excluding dissenting perspectives.

Stoermer concludes “The Phoenix Declaration lays the groundwork for dismantling American education under the guise of reform... The erosion of public education, the attacks on historical integrity, and the narrowing of acceptable narratives are all part of this broader dogmatic assault.”

In Florida, that agenda already feels well underway. But should it be formally adopted and ratified by our State Board? Absolutely not.

Realistically, what can we do?

As Stoermer urged, expose the agenda. This is my attempt to do just that. You can help by sharing this piece, contacting members of the Florida State Board of Education, or — if you’re anywhere near Crawfordville next Thursday — attending the meeting and speaking up.

Public education belongs to all of us. Let’s try to keep it that way.

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In the summer of 2023, a series Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the Florida Freedom to Read Project (fftrp.org), a group formed to fight book bans in Florida’s schools, revealed a newly created office in the FLDOE whose purpose appeared to be to supporting the co-hort of DeSantis endorsed, conservative school board members elected in 2022. Terry L. Stoops was discovered to be the newly hired Director of ASRD, though his name did not appear in the state database.

During his first year as Director, he attended conservative-education events, presented at the revived Florida Conservative Coalition of School Board Members’ (FCCSBM) annual meeting and his focus appeared to be on aligning district leadership and school board members with Governor DeSantis’ conservative education agenda. Though the stated mission of his office was described as facilitating “partnerships with district leaders,” his work seemed to focused almost exclusively on those with a specific ideological bent.

His office and his $126,000 annual salary were reported to be funded by a federally-supported grant (through the University of South Florida) meant for student health, safety, technology and “well-rounded educational opportunities.”

The secrecy around his office raised concerns about transparency and accountability to which then Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr. replied “Cry More.”

In September 2023, the Editorial Board at the Sun Sentinel wrote:

“None of these actions will likely surprise Floridians who have followed the DeSantis administration. They know he diverts public money to serve his political agenda and his propensity for hiring inexperienced far-right propagandists...The limited Terry Stoops story reveals more about the outsized, arrogant thirst for secrecy that infests state government, and the utter disregard for Floridians’ rights to know how his office and others spent our money.”

Now, it appears Stoops has quietly left the FLDOE in August and is now serving as Director of State Affairs for Defending Education, previously known as Parents Defending Education (PDE). Defending Education is an organization that self-identifies as a grassroots effort, but their connections to the Koch network and conservative dark money affiliates says otherwise. They are part of the well-funded effort to privatize public education.

Sounds like a great fit for Mr. Stoops.

Stoops’s quiet departure leaves lingering questions about the role and purpose of the ASRD office — and about how federal and state resources were used to advance a politically aligned education agenda under the guise of district “resilience.” His departure may close one chapter in Florida, but Tallahassee’s broader effort to politicize and privatize public education will undoubtedly continue.

When the February 2025 Count came around, the results were apparently so alarming that the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) never released them. Instead, the Department relied on the concerning October Count to fund schools for the rest of the year. By spring, the FEFP had run out of money before fully funding public schools. Districts were left holding the empty bag.

What was in that February Count that led to its suppression? As lawmakers consider funding reforms next session, there must be a full and transparent accounting of the 2024–25 funding breakdown. Taxpayers deserve answers.
Release the Fourth Calculation — and order a complete audit of the 2024–25 FEFP.

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How We Got Here

Something unusual happened last year (2024-25) with Florida’s K-12. Expansion of the state’s universal voucher program left the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) and Step Up for Students, the Scholarship Funding Organization, unable to verify whether more than 27,000 students were enrolled in public school or using a publicly funded scholarship/voucher leaving the primary funding formula (the Florida Education Finance Program or FEFP) with a $47 million deficit. Word on the street is, after the state paid out the final payment for vouchers, they ran out of money to properly fund the districts.

What happened? It’s still not entirely clear. Representatives from the FLDOE cited difficulties verifying student enrollment through “cross-checks.” As a result, some districts weren’t funded for students who sat in their classrooms all year, while voucher payments were paused for families whose children appeared on both district and scholarship lists. In some cases, students with similar names caused further delays in funding. Many voucher recipients have never attended public schools and therefore lack official student ID numbers, making verification even harder.

The House PreK-12 Budget Subcommittee has already begun discussions to prevent a repeat of last year’s problems.

Still, no one is asking the key question: What happened to the Fourth Calculation of the FEFP?

The Missing Fourth Calculation

Florida’s public schools are funded on a per pupil basis, based on student attendance during two official count weeks, one in October and another in February. Usually, the FEFP issues 5 official calculations, adjusting payments based on changes in estimates or documented attendance.

• The First Calculation is based on estimates and the newly proposed budget from the Legislature.

• The Second Calculation is released before school begins and reflects updated estimates.

• The Third Calculation reflects the actual student counts during the October Count, it is usually released in mid to late January but this past year wasn’t released until March in 2025. The 2024-25 Third Calculation survey had significant red flags.

  • There were approximately 23,000 students reported for funding by both a school district and a scholarship funding organization. [23,000 students at about $9,000 each represents $270 million of inappropriately allocated funds.]

  • In addition, the initial third calculation showed one school district with a negative amount of state FEFP funds (FES vouchers can only be funded through state contributions).

• The Fourth Calculation is meant to reflects the actual student counts during the February Count. Usually released in April or May, the 2024-25 Fourth Calculation has never been released (and it is rumored that there is no intention of doing so). Rather than making adjustments based on the Fourth Calculation, the 2024-25 FEFP relied entirely on the October counts.

• The Final Calculation makes adjustments as needed with addition or subtraction from the next year’s budget and is usually released in the following Fall.

Rep. Persons-Mulicka, Chair of the House PreK-12 Budget subcommittee, says she has asked the Department to complete the final calculation for 2024-25 and that data is “currently under review.”

A Word About The FEFP

Several times during the recent House PreK-12 Budget sessions, panelists from the FLDOE and Step Up for Students noted the challenges of working within Florida’s 50-year-old FEFP. The formula wasn’t designed to account for students frequently moving in and out of schools, and to some, it seems antiquated in today’s era of school choice.

I urge caution before attempting a full redesign. Florida’s FEFP has long been a national model, fairly funding students based on their needs, regardless of where they live in the state’s diverse communities. It has withstood multiple legal challenges and has served public schools effectively for decades.

That said, there may be ways to provide the flexibility needed for universal vouchers without undermining the public school funding formula. Some proposed ideas include:

• Creating a state-funded categorical specifically for vouchers

• Removing vouchers from the FEFP entirely and funding them separately, preventing overfunding of vouchers from defunding public schools

• Funding FES vouchers as if they were their own district

Problems Persist

This year, even before the 2025 October count, another 22,000 students have been identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. Most of these students are sitting in classrooms daily, yet districts aren’t being funded for them because their names are on a scholarship lost. The FLDOE has asked school districts to help perform the critical cross-checking process — a time-consuming, unfunded task.

In short: there was a serious funding breakdown last year, and early signs suggest the problem continues. Full transparency demands the release of the Fourth Calculation to clarify how the FEFP overspent its budget last year and to restore trust in Florida’s K-12 funding system.

Legislative Efforts: Improving Transparency And Efficiency

Last spring, the Florida Senate raised alarms about persistent funding and accountability problems following the rapid expansion of the state’s universal school voucher system. Recognizing the need for better ways to track where students were at key points throughout the school year, Senator Don Gaetz championed SB 7030, designed to “create reasonable timeframes and mechanisms to improve both transparency and efficiency in education funding.”

The Senate passed SB 7030 in a bipartisan fashion. The House killed the bill.

Clearly reforms are still needed. The 2024-25 FEFP calculation was an unmitigated disaster, leaving districts to deal with millions of dollars of lost funding at the end of the fiscal year.

Conclusion: Follow The Money. Release The Data.

This year, lawmakers appear ready to revisit these issues. But before new reforms are drafted, they must fully understand what went wrong. The simplest, most transparent step is to release the missing Fourth Calculation. Only then can Florida ensure that every public dollar follows the student as intended — and that both taxpayers and schools can trust the numbers.

At the time, we made one simple request:

“REAL education experts — not just those from the Foundation for Excellence in Education — should be involved.”

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Needless to say, that review never happened. Every attempt since to soften the negative impacts of Florida’s accountability system has met resistance — with the Foundation for Excellence in Education ( ExcelinEd, founded by Jeb Bush) involved at every step. Florida’s policymakers dare not touch the golden calf of “accountability.”

Just last year, when faced with a proposal to let parental input influence mandatory, test-based third-grade retention decisions, House Speaker Paul Renner declared he and his colleagues would “light themselves on fire” before changing the current system.

But now — it seems the Foundation’s own CEO, Patricia Levesque, is beginning to smell the accountabaloney.

In a recent Orlando Sentinel op-ed, Levesque called for Florida to “lead the nation in math policy.” She noted that “Florida’s grade 8 math performance ranks near the bottom of the nation,” and proposed adding math coursework to teacher prep programs, mandating 60 minutes of uninterrupted math instruction for students, and investing in “safe AI tutoring platforms.” (Sure — AI chatbots sound like a GREAT solution to a math crisis. NOT. That’s a subject for another blog.)

More interestingly, Levesque urged policymakers to “fix a serious flaw in middle school grade calculation that incentivizes schools to accelerate as many students as possible — even those who might not be ready — into high school coursework.” She described it as a “perverse incentive.”

NEWS FLASH: It was her Foundation that created that “perverse incentive.”

In 2011, HB 1255 established the “Middle School Acceleration” category in school grade calculations, rewarding middle schools whose students passed high school-level EOC exams or earned industry certifications. The bill’s staff analysis explained the goal clearly: to “incentivize middle schools to offer more difficult high school curriculum for students ready for these courses.”

With the Foundation’s blessing, the state began pressuring middle schools to enroll all 7th graders scoring Level 3 or higher in high school Algebra — penalizing schools that didn’t. The accountability formula counted every 8th grader who had scored a Level 3 in 7th grade in the denominator, whether or not they were actually in Algebra, ensuring that schools took a hit for students not “accelerated.” Florida’s Accountability system has always favored the stick over the carrot.

To be clear, there is no state mandate requiring students who score level 3 or higher on the 7^th grade Math FSA to be accelerated into Algebra 1 in 8^th grade - but middle schools are not able to score 100% of the “Middle School Acceleration Success” points if they are not.

The perverse incentive was by design and Jeb’s Foundation was 100% behind it.

In 2015, I described the problems with the Middle School Acceleration calculation in a post called “Skip Ahead Or Remediate? Compliance Rather Than Commitment.” At the time I noted that many schools recognized some students were not ready to skip 8th grade math and be accelerated to Algebra 1, appropriately placing them in 8th grade math. Others, chasing school grades, simultaneously placed these students into BOTH Algebra 1 and an Intensive Math “elective” designed to increase the child’s chance of passing the Algebra 1 EOC and scoring Acceleration Success points for the school. Such class placement defied logic.

It was a perfect example of accountabaloney:

“Class placement decisions that are made for the benefit of school grades are accountabaloney. Such decisions are all too common in Florida: where the focus is on compliance rather than commitment and many middle schools focus on the school grade calculations, ignoring the needs of the child.”

I am glad Levesque can finally smell it.

After more than a decade of chasing metrics instead of meaning, could Florida’s accountability system finally be collapsing under all its baloney? The very architects of the system can smell it and are now admitting their system has created perverse incentives.

If Florida truly wants to lead the nation in education, it won’t come from new mandates, longer math blocks, or AI tutors. It will come from listening — really listening — to educators, students, and families who’ve been living with the consequences of this accountabaloney all along and questioning Florida’s myraid of perverse incentives that place systems’ needs before those of students’.

“HB1s fiscal analysis vastly underestimates the costs of this voucher expansion and if this isn’t corrected, public schools will bear the brunt of your budgeting error. We should learn from the experiences in both Arizona and New Hampshire where they underestimated the costs of their Universal ESAs. It is nonsensical to believe that half of the families currently paying to send their children to these private schools will NOT apply to get free money.

Of course they will.”

-Sue Woltanski, public comment on HB1, House PreK-12 Appropriations subcommittee, 2/23/23

SPOILER ALERT: We did not learn.

And now, while more and more state funding is diverted to voucher recipients, Florida is requiring school districts to raise local property taxes to fill the void.

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When HB1 passed in 2023, ushering in Universal Vouchers in Florida, the Fiscal Analysis was a study in wishful thinking. It assumed only 50% of eligible private school families would apply, ignored the shift of homeschooled PEP students into the FEFP-funded Family Empowerment Scholarship, and failed to consider the long-term impact of expansion on future budgets.

In other words: “when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” And now Floridians are living with the consequences.

The HB1 Staff Analysis predicted just $112.1 million in new costs to serve 58,000 additional private school students.

In reality, the state now funds over 280,000 Family Empowerment Scholarships (FES)—including more than 250,000 students who never attended public schools. That’s 95% of the new voucher recipients, at a cost approaching $4 billion.

Since 2023, state funding for the FEFP has grown by $2.3 billion, but every dollar of that growth went to vouchers. District and charter schools received none of it.

The HB1 Staff Analysis also predicted NO fiscal impact on local governments. That, too, has proven to be absurd.

Contrary to the prediction that there would be no fiscal impact on local governments, the state has adjusted the funding formula – requiring Florida districts to rely more heavily on local property taxes. In 2022–23, local taxpayers covered 44.7% of the FEFP ($11.0 billion of $24.6 billion). Today, they cover 46.4% ($13.7 billion of $29.5 billion)—a state-mandated increase of more than $500 MILLION annually in property taxes.

While Governor DeSantis and CFO Blaise Ingoglia crisscross the state on their “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight” (FAFO) tour, blaming local governments for rising property taxes, the reality is clear: vouchers aren’t just draining state general revenue—they are also driving up local property taxes.

The transition to universal vouchers in Florida’s HB 1 didn’t just drain state coffers—it shifted the burden onto local taxpayers. This was no accident. When leaders fail to plan responsibly, they plan for families and public schools to fail instead. The real question now is whether lawmakers will confront the mounting costs of unchecked voucher expansion—or continue ignoring its impact on taxpayers, communities and their local public schools.

On September 12, 2025, Florida’s Joint Legislative Budget Commission met and heard this fall’s Long-Range Financial Outlook (LRFO) for Fiscal Years 2026-27 through 2028-29. The LRFO is a constitutionally mandated report that presents recommended fiscal strategies to assist the legislature in making budget decisions. This year’s report brought both good news and bad news.

The Good News

Actions taken by the Legislature in the 2025 Session significantly improved the state’s near-term financial position. For Fiscal Year 2026-27, the LRFO now projects a surplus of $3.8 billion, compared to last year’s projected deficit of $2.8 billion—a positive swing of nearly $6.6 billion. This improvement comes from a 9.9% increase in Funds Available, driven primarily by a higher balance forward from released contingency reserves and permanent redirects approved during the 2025 Session, along with a 2.6% reduction in projected expenditures due to budget adjustments made last session.

The Bad News

Projected budget deficits remain substantial in future years: $1.5 billion in 2027-28 and $6.6 billion in 2028-29. The committee warned that current revenue forecasts “will not support spending at its recent rate of growth,” meaning continued fiscal strategies are necessary.

House Budget Committee Chair Lawrence McClure noted the 2026-27 surplus but stressed that “our work is just not done... I intend for the House to dig even deeper this year for efficiencies, for waste, ineffective programs... everyone understands that we got to keep chipping away at this.” Senator Boyd agreed, vowing to “work real hard... to accomplish that.”

When asked about potential areas for cuts, Rep. McClure highlighted health care and education as the largest portions of the budget. He emphasized that services wouldn’t need dramatic reductions, but the challenges could be “easily solved” by “just not spending as much of the new money.”

Let’s examine where new state funding in K-12 education has gone in recent years.

First, it is important to understand that the LRFO only compares STATE General Revenue (GR) vs GR STATE Expenses. The State only funds part of the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). The rest is funded by local property taxes through a calculation called the Required Local Effort. In districts that are “property rich,” local property owners are asked to generate as much as 90% of their district’s FEFP funding (with the State chipping in the final 10%). In districts with lower property tax bases, the State contributes a larger percentage of the FEFP.

Lets compare the State GR and the FEFP in 2022-23 (the year before Florida enacted universal vouchers) and the current year FEFP 2nd Calculation.

Since 2022-23, District enrollment (Unweighted Full Time Equivalent or UFTE) declined by almost 27K students but Total UFTE Enrollment increased by over 250K students. That growth was ALL in the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES), which grew over 280K, including the almost 27K students who apparently left district operated public schools. The FEFP is now funding over 250K new FES students who were NEVER in district operated public schools. In other words, 95% of the new FES students were never in public schools.

Total STATE funding for the FEFP grew by $2.3 Billion since 2022-23, but STATE funding going to district and charter schools decreased by almost $300 Million. Meanwhile, STATE funding for FES vouchers increased by $2.5 Billion. The total increase of STATE funding in the FEFP of $2.3 Billion since 2022-2023 was driven by the increase of FES for students who were never in district operated schools. Remember, FES vouchers can only be paid for by state funds.

To be clear, this does NOT mean the FEFP formula generated LESS funding for District students year over year. Rather, the STATE contributed less and less to districts, requiring districts to raise more and more via their RLE or local property taxes, to the point that essentially ALL of the increases in STATE funding increases have gone to fund FES vouchers.

When you compare FES spending to recurring GR Revenue and Appropriations, you can see that STATE funding for FES vouchers has had a major impact.

• The growth in available recurring state GR from 2022-2023 until 2025-2026 was $2.9 billion, of which $2.5 Billion went to FES students. FES students who were never in public schools consumed approximately $2.3 Billion, or about 78% of the growth in available recurring state GR.

• Spending for recurring state GR increased about $8.3 billion. The $2.3 Billion spent for scholarships for students who were never in district operated schools accounted for about 27.3% of that increase. For the record, state funding for district managed public schools and charters accounted for NONE of that increase.

Since the expansion of Florida’s Universal Vouchers, nearly all new state K-12 funding has gone to students who were never enrolled in district schools. Meanwhile, traditional public schools have seen their state contributions shrink, forcing local communities to make up the difference. If lawmakers fail to address this trajectory, districts will continue to shoulder the financial burden, voucher programs will consume an ever-larger share of state resources, and Florida’s ability to maintain a stable, sustainable budget will be increasingly compromised. Florida cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the fiscal impacts of vouchers. Addressing voucher growth is no longer just an education issue—it’s a fiscal imperative.

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The recent Next Steps blog post, “Can’t You Feel a Brand New Day?” Keith Jacobs paints a rosy picture of Florida’s education “marketplace,” where public schools and private scholarship programs supposedly work hand-in-hand to empower families. The imagery is bright, the promises are bold — but, like in 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, it’s worth pulling back the curtain. Behind the smoke and spectacle is not empowerment or freedom, but the quiet dismantling of public education.

School districts should not legitimize a system designed to undermine them. They should refuse to participate in Step Up’s marketplace. Selling courses and services turns schools into vendors in a competitive marketplace, diverting focus from their mission to serve every child. Districts must stand firm as providers of a public good, not just another supplier in a privatized system.

In his post, Keith Jacobs, who oversees "provider development" at Step Up for Students — Florida’s powerful voucher organization — demonstrates they are not simply content with diverting funds to private and homeschool programs. Jacobs' job is to actively recruit elected school boards into their new “education marketplace,” a system designed to dismantle public schools and sell them off piece by piece. That is the “Brand New Day” he wants you to feel.

Is it a coincidence that Jacobs chose the song from “The Wiz" that echoes “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead”? Whether intentional or not, the choice suggests that public schools — the very foundation of our communities — are obstacles to overcome rather than institutions to be supported and improved.

As I recently wrote, privatization advocates like Jacobs and his Step Up companions use words like "personalization" and "customization" as cover for the unbundling and dismantling of public schools.

"Like a vulture capitalist stripping distressed companies for parts, proponents of ‘unbundling’ seek to break schools into pieces and sell them in an education marketplace.” https://accountabaloney.com/selling-floridas-public-schools-piece-by-piece/

This vision isn’t new. It traces back to Milton Friedman’s 1955 proposal to apply free-market principles to education, later championed by Jeb Bush and his allies. For more than 25 years, Florida lawmakers have expanded Friedman’s vision: building charter schools, broadening voucher programs, and now encouraging public schools themselves to sell courses off, piece by piece.

But public schools are not just another vendor in a marketplace. They are a cornerstone of democracy — built to serve every child, in every community, with transparency and accountability. Reducing them to “providers” competing for customers erodes their public mission and shifts the responsibility for education away from the community and onto individual families.

Choice may sound liberating, but markets always sort winners and losers. Families with resources — time, transportation, technology, and social capital — will navigate the maze of options. Vulnerable students, those with special needs, or those in rural and low-income areas are too often left with fewer, not better, opportunities.

The curtain conceals the reality: vouchers and marketplace schemes siphon funds away from neighborhood schools to subsidize private and often unregulated providers. These programs promise innovation, but more often deliver uneven quality, profit-seeking, and diminished public oversight. In public schools, accountability comes through elected boards and open meetings. In the marketplace, it disappears into the shadows.

What Florida families truly need is not a magic show of endless “choice,” but the guarantee that every neighborhood school is well-funded, safe, and staffed with qualified teachers. We should strengthen public schools, not hollow them out with illusions of competition.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends discover that the Wizard’s power was all smoke and mirrors. The true strength came from within the community itself — courage, heart, and wisdom. Florida should take that lesson to heart. Our children’s future depends not on dismantling public education into a marketplace, but on investing in the public schools that hold our communities together.