The floodgates begin to open

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Sep 28, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

With a $50 million infusion from a billionaire benefactor, Success Academy, the polarizing charter-school network in New York City, announced last week that it will open its first schools in Florida.

Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz told the Miami Herald that she wants to open between three and five schools in Miami through a state program that provides taxpayer-funded subsidies and administrative favors to select charter schools, which are public schools that are managed by private entities.

Success hopes to open its new Miami schools by the 2027-28 school year. And it aims to enroll as many as 10,000 students from across Miami-Dade County within five years, Moskowitz told the Herald.

More schools in other parts of Florida could follow for the chain, which has a powerful booster in Miami billionaire and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin. The recent Florida transplant, who moved his hedge-fund from Chicago to Miami in 2022, has quickly become one of the most influential people in state politics.

Success Academy’s expansion has been enabled by a new school-privatization law — a law that was written in part by lobbyists for Success Academy and Ken Griffin, according to records obtained by Seeking Rents.

That law expands a state program known as “Schools of Hope.” Started in 2017, the program generally offers cash grants, low-interest loans, and reduced regulatory oversight to state-approved charter networks that open schools serving students from traditional public schools that have been designated as “persistently low performing.”

The new law — passed at the last second of this year’s legislative session — broadened the definition of “persistently low performing” so significantly that there are now more than five times as many traditional public schools across Florida that make the list. And that means there are now many more locations around the state where a charter operator like Success Academy can put a new school and still qualify for the Schools of Hope subsidies.

Miami-Dade County, for instance, had no “persistently low performing” schools last year, before Success Academy and Ken Griffin lobbied to change the law. The county now has 29 such schools — including three that are simultaneously rated as “A” schools and nine rated as “B” schools under Florida’s public school-grading system.

Twenty-nine schools in Miami-Dade County are now designated as “persistently low performing.” (Source: Florida Department of Education)

Success Academy is not the only charter network taking advantage of the looser rules. New Jersey-based KIPP TEAM & Family recently notified school officials in Orlando that it also intends to open a new campus in Central Florida through the Schools of Hope program.

KIPP currently runs a pair of Schools of Hope in Miami — an elementary school and middle school — that share a location on a campus of Miami-Dade College. The new location would follow a similar model.

Dubbed “KIPP Central Florida – Orlando,” KIPP plans to start with an initial campus that would open for the 2028-29 school year and serve fewer than 400 students, according to a Notice of Intent the networked submitted last month to the Orange County School Board.

But KIPP expects to grow rapidly from there — to a full K-12 program, a second on-site school, and 2,600 students by the fifth year of operation.

KIPP says it is currently “exploring several sites” in Orlando. But it plans to serve students from five schools generally on the western side of the city that are all now considered “persistently low performing” under the new definition.

None of the five were designated as persistently low performing last year.

An excerpt from KIPP TEAM & Family’s Notice of Intent to open a new School of Hope in Orlando. (Source: Orange County Public Schools)

Of course, more charter operators tapping into the Schools of Hope program also means more money from Florida taxpayers. The DeSantis administration has already asked for another $20 million from Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature, which has allocated more than $300 million for the program since its inception.

And that is likely a small fraction of what’s to come.

For instance, Success Academy alone has suggested to state lawmakers that it could seek roughly $50 million just to cover start-up costs for its first wave of Florida schools, according to emails obtained in public-records requests.

More significantly, the New York chain has proposed a permanent subsidy of between $4,000 and $5,000 a year for every student it serves. That would equal nearly $50 million a year in perpetuity should enrollment reach 10,000 students.

It’s an early issue to watching during Florida’s 2026 legislative session, which begins in January.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

Page one in the grifter’s playbook

UWF’s conservative makeover: Fires its top lawyer; hires DeSantis-linked firm; Manny Diaz seeks school presidency (Fresh Take Florida)

See also: Florida wants to buy 4 acres in the Panhandle. The price tag? $83M (Tampa Bay Times) ($)

Meanwhile…

More than half of Miamians can barely make ends meet, new report finds (Miami Herald) ($)

See also: Clearwater study says leaving Duke could drop residents’ electric bills (Tampa Bay Times) ($)

Florida burned more than $200 million of hurricane-response money on ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Keaton Beach residents feel forgotten, rely on each other one year after Hurricane Helene (Tallahassee Democrat) ($)

Such a deal! Florida ed dept. announced charters that co-habit with public schools can do so without any charge. What happened to the principle of "per pupil" that rules state money going into charter budgets? And will the charters share any of their bounty?

Expand full comment

S Russell

Sep 29

As always, thanks for the great reporting! With so much corruption and insanity constantly talking place at the national level, so many other stories get buried and never gain traction.

It's important for people to remember that every student that private schools steal away with vouchers, every parent that takes a voucher to then homeschool their kid, and every student that these charter schools steal away, is one less student in our already heavily underfunded public schools.

As our public schools become further drained of funding and attacked relentlessly, they will deteriorate both physically and in academic success. Public schools will lose good teachers to these charters and private schools because the state will ensure they can pay better than the public schools. ALL of this is by design.

The Republican party is finally achieving a decades long desire to destroy public education, all while most people remain completely oblivious to the fact that it's even happening. It's truly insidious...

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