For years, critics of education choice have been saying it will unleash an educational apocalypse in Florida. But what’s unfolding isn’t an apocalypse. It’s a renaissance.

 “For 25 years we’ve been hearing that the sky’s going to fall,” said Ron Matus, director of research and special projects at Step Up For Students, the nation’s largest education choice scholarship funding organization, which manages 98% of Florida’s K-12 programs. “They have said forever that school choice was going to ruin everything, and instead the exact opposite has happened.”

Matus made his comments when he recently sat down with Ginny Gentles at the Defense of Freedom Institute to share the Florida story and discuss the Sunshine State’s historic influence on family-driven education choice.

The podcast covers everything from teacher entrepreneurs to à la carte learning to innovative options springing up in rural areas, where many opponents say choice can’t succeed. Matus also cited several schools and providers as examples of thriving innovation happening across the state.

When it comes to education, Matus said, surveys show many families want the same basic things, such as safety, academic rigor, and character-building instruction that can be faith-based or secular.

“After that, there are a million different things they want slightly different,” he said. “They may want old-school school — they don’t want any bells and whistles. Others may want a forest school or an outdoor school. That’s where pluralism should come into play.”

 All of these are possible in Florida, Matus said, thanks to robust policies that empower families. “In every possible way, public education in Florida has gotten better. So many people did the right thing and moved the ball down the field to build a system where parents have the power to determine the best education for their kids.”

LAUREL HILL, Fla. – Bryan and Laine Baker didn’t set out to start a school. They were focused on their kids and their up-and-coming cattle operation. But then Laine met a woman at a business conference in 2023 who was creating a hybrid homeschool 20 miles from the Bakers’ ranch.

The pair kept in touch, and one day, the woman asked if the homeschoolers in her orbit could do a “ranch day” at the Baker place. The next thing the Bakers knew, 50 to 75 kids at a pop were being driven from up to two hours away, from all over the Florida Panhandle and even South Alabama, so they could learn how to ear-tag cows, drive tractors, and use compasses in the woods.

“We were like, ‘What is going on?’ “ Laine said.

What’s going on is education freedom in Florida, which is happening at a scale America’s never seen.

Now the Bakers are part of the movement, too.

Their experience with those adventurous homeschoolers planted a seed that’s now spilling over with fruit. The Bakers’ Wagyumama Schoolhouse sits on 140 acres of woods and pasture, framed by hay rolls and pecan trees just shy of the Alabama line. For Florida, it’s pretty remote.

And yet, what the Bakers started last year with seven students in a barn now serves more than 100 students in two locations, almost all of them using state choice scholarships.

The demand “tells me you’re trying to fit yourself in a shoe that doesn’t fit,” said Laine, who struggled with dyslexia as a child and became a fitness trainer and entrepreneur. “There is a place for everyone to learn. In public school, it’s one way. Here, it’s many ways.”

Students can attend “ranch school” two to four days a week, for three hours a day. And/or come for “ranch day,” a two-hour à la carte experience on Fridays. And/or sign up for electives like building, cooking, or entrepreneurship, which are offered on an à la carte basis Monday through Friday.

The school’s second location, an hour south, is more focused on nature than agriculture, but has similar scheduling options.

The students learn core academics and so much more. At the ranch, they dehorn cattle, bottle feed calves, and do blood tests on cows to check for pregnancies. They also maintain a big garden, care for the chickens, and frequently cook the food they grow.

Along the way, life sometimes administers a pop quiz.

A couple of months ago, a cow was having trouble giving birth. The calf was stuck. Both were at risk of dying. A ranch hand tried pulling the calf out, but no luck. Some of the students suggested tying a rope to the calf and using a golf cart to pull it free. It worked.

“This place here, you never know what you’re going to learn,” Bryan said. “The kids saved that calf.” Today, both mother and baby are doing okay.

The families who access Wagyumama Schoolhouse also pick and choose from a menu of other providers.

Florida now has more than 150,000 à la carte students and 7,000+ à la carte providers, making it far and away the leading state when it comes to “unbundled education.”

As more families choose this path, even more providers will emerge.

The Sunshine State already has more than 40 learning operations on farms and ranches. Most of them formed in the past three years, after Florida expanded eligibility for choice scholarships to all students.

“This is way crazier than I ever expected,” Bryan said about the school’s growth. Choice scholarships “literally opened the door wide open.”

Bryan is a retired Marine and former gym owner whose ties to Sunshine State soil go back 150 years. His family sold the Central Florida farm he grew up on, which left him longing for that lifestyle not only for himself, but he and Laine’s two children, Koa, 17, and Kai, 11.

In 2019, the Bakers bought an old cotton farm near the tiny town of Laurel Hill, 70 miles northeast of Pensacola. After they painstakingly converted 80 acres into pasture, they bought a small herd of Akaushi Japanese Red Cattle.

Now they have 50 cows, a top-tier wagyu operation, and, for them, the perfect place to raise a family.

“I don’t need to worry about where (Kai) is. He’s in the field, or with the cows and dogs, or picking blackberries,” Bryan said. In some urban areas, “kids can’t even ride their bikes in their neighborhoods because it’s too dangerous. Here a snake might be the biggest worry.”

The Bakers briefly sent their kids to schools in the area. But classroom disruptions and other issues led them to homeschooling. That, along with what they saw from those homeschoolers on ranch day, is what inspired Wagyumama Schoolhouse.

The Bakers’ approach to education is impossible to put in a box.

It’s heavily hands-on and place based. There’s a strong focus on building a solid foundation in literacy and numeracy. There are echoes of Waldorf, Montessori, and Charlotte Mason. Recently, the school began using the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction, reflecting a belief that the structured, multisensory method originally developed for students with dyslexia benefits many kinds of learners.

Wagyumama’s 10 teachers are diverse, too. Some taught in traditional schools, including one who was a literacy coach in the local public school system. Some learned as they homeschooled their own children.

To track academic growth, they use NWEA’s MAP assessment, a nationally respected standardized test.

As the school’s growth would suggest, plenty of families think the ranch school strikes the right balance.

Lexi Franklin and her family moved to the area a few years ago when her husband, who’s in the Air Force, was assigned to a base about an hour away.

Their son Will, now 6, began attending a local school with a good reputation. But with so many hours sitting at a desk and plugged into screens, he felt out of place. “That isn’t the way he learns,” Lexi said. “My kids are used to being outside.”

By contrast, Will and his classmates at Wagyumama are sometimes taught reading lessons while sitting on hay bales. They learn about the water cycle by measuring how much rain evaporates from cups they’ve placed outside the barn.

Lexi, who works as an executive assistant, said her family would not have been able to access the school without the choice scholarship. Still, she wanted to be sure about Will’s progress, knowing the family might get re-assigned again and not wanting Will to start behind in whatever school might be next.

Wagyumama doesn’t issue report cards. But the standardized test results showed Will made strong progress this year and is now performing above grade level in reading and math.

Meanwhile, there are other encouraging results.

“He has gone from very shy, very quiet … to his confidence growing by leaps and bounds,” Lexi said.

Two of Mollie Allen’s kids, Samuel, 11, and Sarah, 9, attend Wagyumama’s other location, at a nature park affiliated with an environmental center.

Their prior schools veered from one extreme to another. The first was high performing but pressure packed, with only 15 minutes for lunch and 20 for recess. The second had bigger classes – and bigger challenges with classroom management.

Mollie, a speech language pathologist, discovered Wagyumama last fall after deciding to homeschool.

Compared to the prior schools, she said, there’s far more outside time and hands-on learning. When her kids learned a science lesson about buoyancy, for example, they built little boats out of popsicle sticks and tin foil and tested them in the nature park.

Meanwhile, if Samuel finishes his work early and wants to get up, he isn’t told to sit like he was before. Instead, he’s asked to organize PE activities for the younger kids. “He’s become a leader,” she said.

“Wagyumama Ranch has a setup that’s aligned with how kids are meant to learn,” Mollie said. Samuel and Sarah have “gone from not wanting to go to school … to not wanting to miss school. Huge, drastic difference.”

Editor’s note: This commentary from Jason Bedrick, a research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, and Matt Ladner, director of the Arizona Center for Student Opportunity and reimaginED executive editor, appeared Thursday on thetanddd.com.

“All children in South Carolina should have access to the highest quality education possible.” So declared Gov. Henry McMaster in recently proclaiming School Choice Week in South Carolina.

To that end, the South Carolina legislature is currently considering a proposal to give families greater freedom to choose learning environments that align with their values and meet their children’s individual learning needs.

The proposal would create education savings accounts (ESAs), letting families access about $6,000 in state funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, special needs therapy and numerous other educational expenses. Ten states have already adopted ESA policies, including five in the last two years.

It’s not hard to understand why.

The pandemic — and especially district schools’ response to it — awakened parents to the need for education choice. Unnecessarily long school shutdowns, mask mandates and concerns over the politicization of the classroom have propelled public support for education choice policies, like ESAs, to all-time highs.

A recent poll of likely voters in South Carolina, conducted by the South Carolina Policy Council, found six in 10 supported the ESA proposal. Support among African American voters was even higher, at 68%.

But not everyone is on board. The teachers’ unions and their allies are doing everything they can to block families from accessing alternatives to the district school system.

In an effort to peel away votes from South Carolina legislators representing rural areas, ESA opponents are arguing that choice policies either don’t benefit rural areas or are harmful to rural district schools.

For example, state Sen. Nikki Setzer, D-Lexington, argues that students in rural areas can’t benefit from the ESA proposal because they supposedly lack private options. “What real option are we giving them? Are we gonna let Johnny in Bamberg drive to Richland County?” he asked recently, “Give me a break.”

Meanwhile, Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, frets that education choice policies would supposedly create a “death spiral” for district schools, “especially in rural areas” because when “kids leave the system, they leave behind all kinds of stranded costs.”

These two claims — that there are no schooling options in rural areas and that rural schools are imperiled because so many students will leave for those options — are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true, but they can both be — and indeed are — false.

To continue reading, click here.

 

WILLISTON, Fla. – When Misty Dodd’s daughter Taelyr was in third grade, her teachers told Dodd that “Tae” needed to be in a school with more rigor. Tae, now 13, was enrolled in the neighborhood school’s gifted program. But she was making straight A’s without breaking a sweat, and so bored, she was racking up demerits for being too chatty.

The teachers suggested a school in Gainesville. But for Dodd, it wasn’t an option. With traffic, it was 45 minutes to an hour from their home in Williston, a town of 2,700 surrounded by pine forest and pasture. And Dodd, a single mom, works 70 hours a week to make ends meet.

“I was embarrassed and frustrated,” said Dodd, who still cries at the recollection five years later. “I was thinking my daughter is going to get lost. What if she loses interest because it’s not challenging enough?”

“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to let her down,’ ” Dodd continued. “I thought, ‘She’s not going to get the education she deserves.’ "

Thankfully, the story of Tae and her mom has an almost perfect ending.

Almost.

Dodd found Tracy Kirby, a former public school teacher who started a home-school co-op on a farm full of trains. Kirby is now Tae’s teacher.

Tae attends the co-op one day a week, then works with Kirby one-on-one, in person, for several hours on another day. Kirby assigns Tae work for the week, and Tae touches base by phone or online as often as necessary.

For Tae and her mom, the arrangement works.

“What Mrs. Kirby does is amazing, and Tae loves it,” Dodd said. “I know I can trust Mrs. Kirby. There’s a 200 percent difference between now and before.”

“The main difference now is, I’m challenged,” Tae said. “Academically, there’s always something for me to do. And if there’s something else I want to do, I can ask, and Ms. Tracy can work it into the curriculum.”

By age, Tae is an eighth grader. But in most of her subjects, she’s performing at a ninth grade level or higher.

The only downside – and it’s a serious one – is cost.

Dodd works two jobs – one as a clerk at the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles; the other as a waitress. It’s not easy paying for Tae’s education. Kirby doesn’t charge for the co-op programming, but there is a fee for the 1-on-1 tutoring. Dodd must also pay for books, a laptop, a printer, and other supplies.

A state-funded education savings account (ESA) that would pay for those expenses, and other learning supplements for Tae, would be “incredible,” Dodd said. “I work two jobs in part to pay for that. A scholarship would be a blessing.”

Florida does have an ESA. It’s popular and successful. But it’s limited to students with certain special needs. Tae is not eligible.

Florida also has the most expansive private school choice programs in the nation. But unlike ESAs, which can be used for a variety of services and providers, traditional school choice scholarships are limited to private school tuition. Dodd could qualify for a traditional scholarship, where eligibility is determined by family income. But it wouldn’t do Tae any good.

(Both the ESA and the income-based scholarships are administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Dodd said she never considered private school for Tae because Kirby’s approach is so good.

Kirby tailors the curriculum to fit Tae’s needs and interests. Tae takes many of her core academic classes through Florida Virtual School. She accesses electives through other online platforms (everything from typing to logic to archaeology). Kirby coordinates all of it, then tops it off with her own guidance and instruction and an emphasis on project-based learning.

For example, Tae is passionate about writing. So Kirby frequently gives her writing assignments, from essays to short stories. One time, Kirby asked Tae to study the past winners of a Florida speech contest. She wanted Tae to learn the techniques behind good speeches and to work on her public speaking skills.

“This propelled her to become an expert and figure out what made dynamic speeches,” Kirby said. “She doesn’t stop until she discovers the why.”

“I continuously find myself in shock over her writing,” Kirby continued. “She has a sharp imagination and adds humor. She can also be serious and argue a point.”

Tae is organized and driven. On her own, she read “The Diary of Anne Frank” in third grade and “The Yearling” in fourth grade. In fifth grade, Kirby gave Tae a thesaurus. She also showed Tae how she took notes in college, and Tae used Kirby’s system as a guide to create her own, better system.

“She’s unlike any student I have seen in all my years of teaching,” Kirby said. “The effort she puts in on her own is remarkable.”

Finances, though, are putting limits on Tae’s pursuits.

Tae is fascinated with forensic science and criminal psychology. Kirby said she’d love to look for STEM kits and online programs that mesh with Tae’s interests, and perhaps enroll Tae part time in a school that specializes in crime scene investigations.

“She’d love it,” Kirby said. “She’d be a little mad scientist.”

But all of that costs money Dodd doesn’t have.

An ESA would change that.

If it’s akin in value to the state’s school choice scholarships, it would cost taxpayers far less than per-pupil spending in Florida district schools. And for students like Tae, the return on investment would be invaluable.

Without Kirby, Dodd said, Tae might have become self-conscious about her intellectual interests and retreated into a shell. “She might have gone backwards,” Dodd said.

Kirby said other students have come to her co-op in that shell, shaped by past schooling experiences. In a different setting, they blossom into self-motivated learners like Tae.

If the state’s scholarships offered more flexibility, more students could access those environments.

For Tae and her mom, it’d be perfect.

CLEWISTON, Fla. – It’s hard to think of anywhere in Florida more off the beaten path than the string of blue-collar towns on the rim of Lake Okeechobee. They’re snugged between the grassy, 30-foot-high dike that corrals America’s second-biggest lake, and a 450,000-acre sea of sugar cane that rolls south towards the Everglades. This is not palmy, beachy Florida. This is burning fields and smoking-sugar-mills Florida.

This is also school choice Florida.

The half-dozen towns that ring Lake Okeechobee are home to 10 private schools that serve more than 600 students using school choice scholarships. Four charter schools in the area serve another 600.

Harvest Academy Christian School in Clewiston, a town too small for a Starbucks, is one of these schools. It opened nine years ago with 12 students. Now it has 120. About 90 use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for lower-income students.* Five use McKay Scholarships for students with disabilities.

“I think it’s the best thing that could have happened,” said Sanjuanita Morales, 29, a stay-at-home mom whose three children attend Harvest Academy with tax credit scholarships. “There’s a lot of people that ask about the school and the scholarships and they say, ‘Oh that’s really cool you have options.’ “

The choice schools here are myth chippers. There’s the myth that school choice can’t work in rural areas because there are too many hurdles – including too few students – to make non-district schools viable. Then there’s the myth that rural school districts, often their area’s biggest employers, are especially hostile to choice because they need to keep themselves viable.

Both myths solidified during last year’s confirmation hearings for Betsy DeVos. Both continue to endure in stories like this, this and this. Yet both seem at odds with what’s happening in Florida, which has one of America’s most diverse educational ecosystems.

School choice war? Not here.

Thirty Florida counties are defined as rural, and this year they’re home to more than 80 scholarship-accepting private schools (like this one). Together, those schools are serving 3,828 tax credit students, 999 McKay students and 287 students using Gardiner Scholarships, an education savings account for students with special needs.* Many also serve students using Florida’s pre-K voucher.

Three of those counties abut Lake Okeechobee.

Hendry County, home to Clewiston, has 39,000 residents scattered over 1,190 square miles. If Hendry were a state, its population density would rank near Nevada’s. Okeechobee County on the north end of the lake is a tad less remote (on par with Colorado); Glades County on the west, two tads more (think New Mexico). The east end of the lake rests in Palm Beach County, but Pahokee and Belle Glade are 40 miles, and a galaxy, from the glitz of West Palm Beach.

As for the other myth: Listen to Jesse Windham, principal of Harvest Academy.

“Everyone thinks it’s a war,” he said about school choice. “It’s not here.” (more…)

Levy County is a sprawl of pine and swamp on Florida’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Gainesville and 100 from Orlando. It’s bigger than Rhode Island. If it were a state, it and its 40,000 residents would rank No. 40 in population density, tied with Utah.

Visitors are likely to see more logging trucks than Subaru Foresters, and more swallow-tailed kites than stray cats. If they want local flavor, there’s the watermelon festival in Chiefland (pop. 2,245). If they like clams with their linguine, they can thank Cedar Key (pop. 702).

And if they want to find out if there’s a place for school choice way out in the country, they can chat with Ms. Judy and Ms. Michele in Williston (Levy County’s largest city; pop. 2,768).

In 2010, Judith Welborn and Michele Winningham left long careers in public schools to start Williston Central Christian Academy. They were tired of state mandates. They wanted a faith-based atmosphere for learning. Florida’s school choice programs gave them the power to do their own thing – and parents the power to choose it or not.

Williston Central began with 39 students in grades K-6. It now has 85 in K-11. Thirty-one use tax credit scholarships for low-income students. Seventeen use McKay Scholarships for students with disabilities.

“There’s a need for school choice in every community,” said Welborn, who taught in public schools for 39 years, 13 as a principal. “The parents wanted this.”

The little school in the yellow-brick church rebuts a burgeoning narrative – that rural America won’t benefit from, and could even be hurt by, an expansion of private school choice. The two Republican senators who voted against the confirmation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – represent rural states. Their opposition propelled skeptical stories like this, this and this; columns like this; and reports like this. One headline warned: “For rural America, school choice could spell doom.”

A common thread is the notion that school choice can’t succeed in flyover country because there aren’t enough options. But there are thousands of private schools in rural America – and they may offer more promise in expanding choice than other options. A new study from the Brookings Institution finds 92 percent of American families live within 10 miles of a private elementary school, including 69 percent of families in rural areas. That’s more potential options for those families, the report found, than they’d get from expanded access to existing district and charter schools.

In Florida, 30 rural counties (by this definition) host 119 private schools, including 80 that enroll students with tax credit scholarships. (The scholarship is administered by nonprofits like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.) There are scores of others in remote corners of Florida counties that are considered urban, but have huge swaths of hinterland. First Baptist Christian School in the tomato town of Ruskin, for example, is closer to the phosphate pits of Fort Lonesome than the skyscrapers of Tampa. But all of it’s in Hillsborough County (pop. 1.2 million).

The no-options argument also ignores what’s increasingly possible in a choice-rich state like Florida: choice programs leading to more options.

Before they went solo, Welborn and Winningham put fliers in churches, spread the word on Facebook and met with parents. They wanted to know if parental demand was really there – and it was.

But “one of their top questions was, ‘Are you going to have a scholarship?’ “ Welborn said. (more…)