Key Points
- Florida schools received national attention two decades ago when Jeb Bush implemented an aggressive reform agenda. As the bipartisan consensus on education reform shifted, however, Florida’s policy story and its results have faded from national consciousness.
- Florida ranks close to the top of the class on overall achievement and at the very top for return on investment. It is the single best state in which to be a low-income public school student.
- While we can’t tease out the effects of individual policies on these achievements, results-oriented governors and legislatures should study and emulate Florida’s education model.
Introduction
The mainstream media has overlooked Florida’s educational achievement—a mistake in the face of any educational bright spot with a unique policy through line, as is the case in Florida.
In the early 2000s, Florida was the state to watch in United States education, thanks largely to then–Gov. Jeb Bush’s outcomes-driven reform initiatives. This period is remembered for significant accountability overhauls, a meaningful prioritization of literacy, and the launching of school choice as we know it today. While Bush’s work granted some lingering status and airtime to Florida education, much of the buzz has receded even as the Florida story has continued to gain steam.
Thanks to minimal shifts in party control at the state level, in the nearly 18 years since Bush left office, there has been sustained gubernatorial involvement and a through line to policy in Florida’s education space. Three strategies have defined the Sunshine State’s legislative agenda: focusing on early education and ensuring all students read by third grade, developing assessment structures that monitor progress rather than impose high stakes, and building an increasingly robust school choice ecosystem. These have played out via the Just Read, Florida! plan, which took the state’s reading initiative to new levels of specificity and urgency, especially in grades K–3; the launch of the universal Voluntary Prekindergarten Education Program (VPK), which added diagnostic and formative literacy assessment as part of its composition in 2016; the creation of the Committee on Early Grade Success in 2017, which, among other initiatives, created a coordinated screening and progress monitoring program to be administered three times each year for students in VPK through third grade with a special focus in literacy; and school-access legislation, beginning with the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 1999.
Most recent are the significant policy initiatives during Gov. Ron DeSantis’s term. The state has maintained and expanded on its traditional focus areas by embarking on a standards overhaul to ensure a knowledge base, becoming the first in the nation to initiate a series of progress-monitoring assessments statewide, pursuing aggressive COVID-19 reopening policies, and expanding accessibility and options in its school choice landscape by opening school vouchers to all students regardless of income.
Many states’ education focus areas fall victim to the pendulum swing brought about by party shifts, but Florida offers a real case study of education-engaged politicians building and sustaining a coherent legislative agenda.
On the most recent administration of “the Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Florida fourth graders ranked third in reading and fourth in math. This followed a steady rise since 2015, when the state placed 10th and 19th in the two subjects, respectively.1
Given its achievement in elementary grades—a success story extending to at-risk subgroups, which largely withstood learning loss from the pandemic and has come about at a fraction of the cost of similarly achieving states— Florida demands our attention. In this report, we outline success points and areas for further study so others can re-create and expand on Florida’s success.