Florida lawmakers may unleash a last-second expansion of school privatization

A late-session push to expand Florida's "Schools of Hope" program emerged out of Miami, where a billionaire Republican megadonor and other local business leaders want to lure a charter-school group.

Photo credit: Michael Rivera

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Florida lawmakers are about to pass a potentially major expansion of a key charter-school program — a sweeping package, negotiated partly in secret, that would allow privatized public schools initially intended to serve struggling communities to expand into more areas, land larger subsidies from taxpayers, and operate with less oversight from locally elected school boards.

The expansion of the so-called “Schools of Hope” program has been slipped into an obscure bill tied to the state’s $115 billion budget, which Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature is expected to pass late tonight. It will be the final act of a 2025 legislative session that has dragged on more than a month longer than expected amid an often-bitter budget dispute between and among GOP leaders in the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The expansion of the charter school program, which was a sticking point during budget negotiations, has been pushed primarily by Republican lawmakers from Miami, including House Speaker Danny Perez, Rep. Demi Busatta, and Sen. Alexis Calatayud. An early version of the legislation would even have limited some of the impacts solely to Miami-Dade County.

It emerged after a new local business-lobbying group called the Partnership for Miami began urging local leaders to “recruit a high-quality charter system” like Success Academy, a New York-based charter-school network that has been weighing a Florida expansion. The effort’s boosters include Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge-funded manager and Republican megadonor who recently moved to Miami, helped form the Partnership for Miami, and donated $25 million to Success Academy.

Records show Griffin’s company, Citadel Enterprise Americas, and Success Academy have both lobbied Florida lawmakers this session on Schools of Hope legislation. Representatives for Citadel and Success Academy could be reached for comment on Monday.

Launched in 2017, the Schools of Hope program was initially pitched as a way to lure high-performing charter-school operators to communities where traditional public schools have been failing for years.

Broadly speaking, a charter-school group approved by the governor-appointed State Board of Education that opens a campus within five miles of a “persistently low performing” public school can qualify for multimillion-dollar subsidies — including cash grants and construction loans — and bypass the typical local approval process for new charter schools.

Schools of Hope are a key plank in a long-running campaign that dates back to former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush to privatize much of public education in Florida — through tools like taxpayer-funded vouchers that can be used at private schools and for homeschooling and charter schools, which are public schools run by private management groups.

The Schools of Hope program specifically was muscled into law of by some of the state’s most prominent supporters of school privatization — including Richard Corcoran, the former state House speaker who became education commissioner and is now president of New College of Florida; Manny Diaz, a former state senator who also became education commissioner and is now president of the University of West Florida; and Byron Donalds, the former state representatives who is now a member of Congress and running for governor in 2026.

Florida’s initial School of Hope — located in one of the state’s poorest and most rural counties — collapsed in failure amid a contracting scandal involving prominent political figures. But Republican leaders have continued to pour money into the program: The Legislature has allocated more than $300 million for Schools of Hope since its inception nearly a decade ago.

Vendor records show the state has paid out about $26 million through the program so far this year. Most of that money of the money has been split between five charter-school groups that between them operate 12 schools around the state that have qualified as Schools of Hope.

Florida’s current Schools of Hope. (Source: Florida Department of Education)

One reason there are only a dozen Schools of Hope is that the current rules are relatively strict about which public schools get designated as “persistently low performing” — which in turn constrains where a charter-school operator can locate a school and still qualify for the Schools of Hope subsidies and other advantages. There are 51 such schools around the state right now.

But that would change under Senate Bill 2510, which would expand the legal definition of persistently low-performing schools. “The modification will greatly increase the number of schools being designated as persistently low-performing schools compared to the current 51 schools,” according to a Senate staff analysis of an early version of the legislation.

That’s not all. The legislation could also enable charter operators to locate campuses further away from the struggling schools whose students they are supposed to serve — potentially allowing them to open up in more affluent areas and yet still qualify as Schools of Hope.

The bill would also force school districts to let a School of Hope open within an existing public school — while simultaneously stripping school districts of any ability to charge a fee for the use of its facilities. It could enable Schools of Hope to continue banking extra public subsidies beyond their first five years of operation. And it would turn taxpayer money meant for loans into pure cash grants.

It could even enable charter operators to bypass local school boards completely when opening a School of Hope by allowing them to sign agreements instead with state universities and colleges — which are increasingly being run by former Republican elected officials who championed the state’s school privatization policies.