BY JOHN WATSON
Florida has long been the leading state in the US in terms of offering online learning options for K-12 students. Plenty of other states have excellent online and hybrid schools and courses available, but since the early days of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the Sunshine State has often been at a different level in terms of scale and access.
Recently, the political energy in Florida has shifted such that much of the attention is on Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), and Step Up For Students seems to be doing a good job of both supporting and reporting on ESA implementation.
An earlier blog post touched on Step Up’s reporting on students and families choosing school options including charter schools, private schools, and district schools of choice. Step Up’s latest report explores what it calls “À La Carte” learning, which the report defines as “using state support to customize education outside of full-time Schools.”
The key points from the report (these are almost but not quite direct quotes) are:
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The number of a la carte scholarship students in Florida has grown from 8,465 to 108,850 in the past five years and will surpass 140,000 students in 2025-26.
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Families using this option will spend more than $1 billion from their ESAs this year, triple the amount from two years ago.
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More than 4,000 à la carte education service providers received state funding through ESAs in 2024-25, up from fewer than 2,000 the year before.
There’s truly a new element to all this, and also echoes of older approaches that are perhaps not getting the recognition they deserve.
Let’s start with the new, because there are impressive elements to the novel approach in Florida.
From the opening of the report:
“Enabled by ESAs, à la carte learning allows families to assemble customized education programming for their children, completely outside of full-time schools, by using state support to pick and choose from an ever-expanding menu of providers.
The concept isn’t new. Homeschoolers have been doing it for generations. But ESAs have not only made it viable for tens of thousands of additional families, they’ve made it more robust by providing more resources. The end result is a new education sector that is especially dynamic and diverse.”
The “new resources” component is key, and the report highlights some exciting options. Along with widespread use of tutoring services, families are choosing from programs that teach “surf skate science,” “forest school enrichment,” field trips for students with special needs, and other truly innovative ideas. I personally find these programs compelling because of my own background, decades ago, teaching at the Keystone Science School and with other organizations taking students out to experience the world.
The report discusses the roots of à la carte learning in homeschooling environments, but I believe it misses another background source—Florida Virtual School.
FLVS was the first online school or program in the country, and possibly the world, to reach hundreds of thousands of students with a course catalog of online courses that students and families could select from. Critical to the growth of FLVS, and different than most other states, the Florida governor—Jeb Bush at the time—and legislature supported the growth of FLVS by at times funding the then-new program directly, without pulling from funding going to traditional school districts.
Students in Florida therefore became accustomed to the idea that they could add an online course or two to supplement their education from their main school, usually a brick and mortar school. This isn’t the same as the current à la carte approach, but arguably those roots are as important as the homeschoolers, in creating the current conditions in Florida.
Further, this approach of a state-funded online course provider has also been the path taken by more than a dozen other states (the exact number depends on how such providers are defined).
There are clear tradeoffs between funding a single or small number of state-supported providers, versus funding an ESA program. An ESA program allows for a greater variety of options from a far larger set of providers. Supporting a state online learning program directly can more easily allow for quality and accountability controls, as well as targeting state funding to needs perceived by the state governor, board of education, or legislature, such as the needs of rural students, or a lack of STEM courses.
The political energy is clearly behind ESAs at the moment. But the winds tend to shift—as we are currently seeing in other areas. For those advocates who are focused on the best outcomes for students and taxpayers, it’s worth considering the full range of ways to support different learning options for students.
Thanks to DLAC member Mandy Perry for keeping us updated on what’s happening in Florida!
