By Gov. Jeb Bush
This piece was originally published in the Orlando Sentinel.
Last week, the president of the Florida Education Association (FEA) filed a lawsuit seeking to eliminate Florida’s heralded and widely used charter and private school choice programs.
One man versus one million families exercising their choice to find the best school for their kids — it feels a little lopsided.
This litigation is a direct assault on the progress we have built over decades. It aims to revisit the unfortunate 2006 ruling by the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Holmes, a decision that struck down the Opportunity Scholarship Program — the first statewide voucher program in the country, established in 2000 to serve students trapped in failing schools.
Back then, the court spun up a narrow and flawed interpretation of the state’s duty to provide a uniform system of free public schools. They argued the state’s constitutional requirement to provide a free system of public schools was not a minimum requirement of the legislature, but a maximum limit on their authority.
I disagreed then, and the evidence over the last 20 years — along with landmark court cases that have gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — offer myriad reasons why choice should be available to all families.
