After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children.
But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected, according to a recently released report from Florida’s auditor general. And when students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised.
On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education.
The findings demonstrate that the bigger these programs get, the harder they can be to manage — putting billions of public dollars at risk as other states are poised to take part in a similar new federal program, observers said.
“This money was money the school districts should have received and never did until this all came to light,” said Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and Kids Count director at the Florida Policy Institute, a think tank that has been critical of vouchers. “Maybe that could have been some more teachers, it could have been enhanced curriculum. It couldn’t happen because the funds were not there to do it.”
With roughly 500,000 students and $4 billion in funding last school year, Florida’s school voucher system is the biggest in the country. It has two main programs: the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which was created in 2001 and gives businesses a tax break for donating to nonprofits that administer voucher programs, and the Family Empowerment Scholarship.
Florida’s auditor general found “a myriad of accountability challenges” with the Family Empowerment Scholarship that was created in 2019 to fund vouchers, known as education savings accounts, or ESAs, that can be used to pay tuition or other school-related expenses. It shortchanged Florida’s public schools by $230 million, providing warning signs for similar programs.
“This is a cautionary tale for other states,” said state Sen. Don Gaetz (R), who supports the state’s voucher programs but has proposed an overhaul to the way they are run. “We cannot walk away from these problems. We can’t fail to pass remedial legislation, or these problems will get bigger, and the trust of taxpayers in this program will begin to diminish.”
For much of the 35-year history of school vouchers, programs have largely been limited to low-income families or students with disabilities. But, with Arizona’s decision in 2022 to make vouchers available to all students, came an explosion of programs across the country that are open to everyone. About a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs.
School vouchers also have become a pillar of the Republican education agenda. In July, President Donald Trump signed into law the nation’s first federal voucher program, estimated to cost $26 billion over 10 years. States may opt into the plan, which will give Americans a 100 percent tax credit — all their money back — when they donate to state-based scholarship programs. It takes effect in 2027.
Supporters say many public schools are failing children, and that families should be able to choose another option, such as private, religious or home-school, and use public dollars to do so. Opponents point to mixed academic outcomes for children and argue these programs siphon money from stretched-thin public schools — the consequences of which are starting to become clear.
In Florida, public school districts are contending with declining enrollment, program cuts and the possibility of closing schools, said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association.
Unlike voucher programs in other states, funding for the Florida Empowerment Scholarship program is commingled with other public education funding, making it difficult to track how dollars are being spent.
“The money’s all being scrambled together in one appropriation,” Gaetz said. “Then the Department of Education is having to unscramble that money, and then make sure it gets to the right place at the right time to benefit the right students.”
But that doesn’t always happen, according to the audit report. In Florida, the state education department sends money to scholarship funding organizations, nonprofits that administer the vouchers. The audit found that the state sent money to the nonprofits before confirming whether students would be using vouchers or attending public schools. As students switched between schools throughout the year, the education department counted some children more than once, then did not do enough to stop or prevent duplicate payments, the auditor said.
Hundreds of voucher accounts for children with disabilities were overfunded, beyond limits set by state law, by a total $2.3 million.
Cassie Edwards, a spokesperson for Florida’s education department, said in an email to The Washington Post that the agency at one point had to pause voucher payments for some students as it figured out where 30,000 of the state’s estimated 3.2 million students were going to school. This year, those students have been matched to the correct programs, she said.
In a Nov. 14 letter to the auditor general, Florida Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas said the department took extra steps to identify potential duplicate student counts, but that verifying enrollment records was a challenge. The department is adopting a “more rigorous process” this year.
“It is important to note that no state has administered a school choice or scholarship program as large as Florida’s,” Kamoutsas wrote. “The Department acknowledges that, while the popularity and growth of the scholarship programs evidence their value and need, the administrative systems supporting these programs must keep pace with their implementation.”
In cases where a student appears to be enrolled in both a public school and a private school or home-school scholarship program, their ESA will not be funded until the family can obtain signed proof the child does not attend a public school, said Scott Kent, a spokesperson for the scholarship funding organization Step Up for Students.
Critics see the auditor’s findings as symptoms of the program’s rapid growth with few guardrails.
“When we don’t have this fiscal accountability and transparency for these massive voucher programs that are ballooning every year, it’s a real problem,” said Qubilah Huddleston, the equitable school funding lead at EdTrust, a left-leaning think tank. “For the states that have recently universalized, like Texas and Tennessee and other states that could soon see vouchers as a result of the federal program, they need to view Florida as a cautionary tale of what happened.”
Meanwhile, Gaetz has put forward a bill he said will increase transparency and fix the issues outlined in the audit — including conducting monthly checks of where students are going to school and assigning each voucher student an ID number that can be cross-checked with public school enrollment lists.
He is also proposing disentangling ESA program funds from public-school dollars. The auditor general made a similar recommendation, which the education department has backed, according to Kamoutsas’s letter.
Robert Enlow, president and chief executive of the pro-voucher group EdChoice, suggested that Florida instead modernize the way it tracks students.
“This is not an indictment on the quality or the effectiveness of the programs; this is an indictment on how bad government management can be,” he said about the audit report. “This is largely a technological problem that relates to double-counting that many other states have handled.”
In the meantime, some Florida parents are worried. Yasmina White, 35, whose daughters attend public school in Jacksonville, said school choice should not come at the expense of the traditional system.
“When you’re making something more attractive, you’re pushing more families out of the public school system,” White said. Amid budget woes, her district, Duval County, closed five schools this year. She supports school choice, but “it’s frustrating because my taxes should go towards my public schools.”
Spar, president of the teachers union, said class sizes are getting bigger. Some music and art courses, even AP classes, have been eliminated because there isn’t enough money.
“It really is having a financial drain on public schools,” he said of the voucher program. “It makes it hard for us to make sure that our students are getting the education that they deserve and need.”
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