Florida teacher union gets beat by school choice and sues the competition

Imagine a corporation that has been running the only restaurant in town for decades. The food is mediocre at best, the service is painfully slow, and the tables are always sticky. Oh, and some customers have died after eating their food. But people keep showing up because there is nowhere else to eat, at least for this cheap. Then one day, new restaurants opened that have similar prices but better service and food. There is real competition in town. And now they are losing customers every week. Instead of hiring a better chef or cleaning the kitchen, they call their lawyer.

That’s essentially what the Florida Education Association (FEA), Florida’s largest teachers union, is doing right now.

The FEA filed a lawsuit in Leon County Circuit Court against the Florida Department of Education, alleging there is a disparity between traditional public schools and private schools receiving taxpayer vouchers that violates the state constitution. The press release was dramatic. The FEA announced that “parents, students, educators, school board members, civil rights organizations, and representative groups” had all joined the fight. Civil rights organizations. Plural. So I read the complaint.

The actual plaintiffs listed in the 39-page filing are: eight individual parents, a single Manatee County schoolteacher named Robert Lyons, and the Florida Education Association. That’s it. Not one civil rights organization is named anywhere in the legal document. No NAACP. No Urban League. No one. This may be because many civil rights organizations know that one of the greatest ways to empower minority parents and students is school choice, and even those who have opposed school choice in the past have faced stiff opposition from minority communities. I am sure a plethora of black and brown parents would be greatly disappointed in these organizations for fighting to take away their ability to choose their child’s school.

Speaking of empowerment, the complaint challenges the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program and Florida’s charter school statute. The filing asks a court to declare the programs unconstitutional and block funding. To put this plainly, they want a judge to make 521,000 children go back to schools their families wanted to leave.

The constitutional lingo they are using here is Florida’s requirement that the state provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high-quality system of free public schools.” The FEA argues that the state has built a system in which publicly funded schools operate under very different rules, resulting in unequal service for students.

The suit asks the court to declare the current scholarship program unconstitutional and to block the flow of public money to private schools, which, according to the Big Labor plaintiffs, operate without the oversight or standards required of traditional public schools. Of course, this ignores the very point of standards and oversight, which is to provide a quality education, something that parents more than anyone else can judge best for their children. Thus the market competition itself fulfills the role of providing the greatest oversight: parents voting with their feet, fleeing failing schools. What’s the point of oversight rules and regulations when public schools routinely fail to teach the basics to students? As the proverb goes, wisdom is justified by her children.

Going back to the restaurant analogy, this is like our failing, mediocre-at-best, and sometimes poisonous hole-in-the-wall restaurant suing on a technicality over food regulations, while few people want to eat there, and ignoring the fact that of those who do, many get sick. The gall of the FEA here is remarkable. Only 21 percent of Florida eighth-graders scored proficient or above in math, and just 25 percent in reading. The union wants to drag the state into court over oversight and accountability for private schools while their own product is failing most of the children sitting in them.

About a quarter of the state’s education budget now goes to voucher programs, up from 12 percent in 2021. When demand for an alternative doubles in three years, something is wrong with the original product.

There were about 521,000 students enrolled in private and homeschooling options with voucher funds for the 2025-2026 cycle. More than half a million Florida families, given a real choice, chose something different. Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas put it plainly:

Florida’s a state that has over 2.8 million students. About 1.4 million of those students are participating in the Choice option because families are now empowered to choose the educational option that best meets their child’s individualized needs. We will stand unapologetically convicted on that principle.

I spent 15 years in California public schools. I know what the union model depends on: parents who have no other option but to send their kids to public school. Families, especially working-class and minority families, sent their kids to the neighborhood school not because it was the best in the area, but because private schools are expensive. School choice broke that model.

In Florida, Governor DeSantis signed HB 1 in March 2023, eliminating income and tuition caps on the scholarship program and allowing any K-12 student to access a voucher of about $8,000 annually for private tuition or other education costs. Florida is the fourth state in the country with a universal voucher program.

The union’s answer to this isn’t “let’s become a school that parents actually want.” It’s “let’s get a judge to take away all the exit doors.”

The sober reminder here is that the battle for school choice in any state is never won. The forces arrayed against it are patient, well-funded, and have eager lawyers on their side. If they lose in the legislature, they try to win it in a courtroom. If they lose there, they will wait for the next election cycle and try again. This is because their very livelihood and existence are threatened. That is why parents who finally have a choice for their children must be more committed to keeping it than the teachers unions that are hellbent on taking it away.