School choice is thriving in Miami-Dade, but who gets left in dying schools? | Opinion

Miami-Dade’s public schools are shrinking. There are some well-known reasons for that: families having fewer children or leaving the county. But it’s also clear that increased competition from other education options also plays a key role in the loss of 90,000 students attending traditional schools since 2012

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For the advocates of Florida’s school choice programs, the dwindling public school numbers offer some validation: When given the option, many parents opt out of their neighborhood school and send their children to a different public school, a charter or a private school on a state-funded voucher because they think their children will get a better or more specialized education at a school beyond the usual boundaries. That makes sense.

But one point gets less attention: the students who are left behind in shrinking public school districts, especially those from less affluent homes with parents who are less involved and perhaps likely to shop around for different options.

American public education is supposed to offer children an equal footing, educating the citizenry regardless of socio-economic background. Florida believes it can achieve that, in part, through privatization, including universal vouchers that use taxpayer dollars to pay for tuition at private schools.

One big drawback: Those schools don’t have to follow the same academic standards as their public counterparts, including the requirement that teachers be certified.

Florida Republican leaders have said that competition will make education better. That may be so for some. But could it also make it worse for others?

If public schools were part of the free market, this would be simple. Schools that attract students with prestigious programs would survive. Those that didn’t would close or consolidate — as nine already did in Miami-Dade this year.

But this is not just a supply-and-demand equation. Florida could be making a grave mistake by looking at parents merely as customers. The expansion of vouchers, in particular, creates the possibility that two separate educational systems, under different rules and standards, are emerging — one boosted and another left to languish.

Some schools are already falling behind the competition. At Miami Killian Senior High in Kendall, enrollment plummeted from 3,700 students in 2004 to only 430 this year. That was the focus of a recent Herald story about Killian’s attempt to survive by creating a business-of-sports magnet program that we hope succeeds.

Although vouchers to attend private schools have grown in popularity, Killian is losing students to other public schools. More than 3,000 students live within the high school’s attendance boundaries, but three different public high schools — Coral Reef Senior High, Terra Environmental Research Institute and Palmetto Senior High — each enroll more students from within Killian’s boundary lines than Killian itself, the Herald reported.

Since 2017, Florida has required school districts to let families enroll their children in that has space for them, and, in 2025, the Miami-Dade School Board made it even easier for parents to bypass their neighborhood schools.

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Those decisions created flexibility and fairness we agree with. A student’s educational opportunities should not be determined by where they live. And, as the Killian example shows, parents have taken advantage of this freedom. We can see why: Coral Reef High, Terra and Palmetto High all score above average on most state assessments, according to the Herald. Killian had below average test scores, though it maintains a B rating overall.

This may be natural selection: parents electing schools with better outcomes. But the danger — and potential unfairness — lies in the possibility that higher performing students are flocking to the same schools while their lower-performing peers stay behind. A student’s ability to attend a different school than the one they are assigned to rests heavily on having parents invested in their education. Unfortunately, not all children have that.

Supporters of vouchers and the expansion of charter schools will argue that’s exactly why Florida has expanded charters and funding for students who wish to attend private schools: so that children don’t have to be confined to lower-performing traditional public schools. Certainly, the rising numbers of vouchers used in Miami-Dade shows there’s an appetite for school choice.

Where there’s competition, there are winners and losers, but in public education we shouldn’t accept that the losers are children.