Sue Kingery Woltanski warns that a key part of Florida’s “free market” for education is a mirage. Reposted with permission.
Step Up’s marketplace is no Emerald City — it’s a mirage built on The dismantling Of public schools.
“When I think about the state of public education in Florida, I recall a song from The Wiz, the 1978 reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, where Diana Ross sang, ‘Can’t you feel a brand new day?’” — Keith Jacobs, Step Up for Students’ Next Steps Blog
The recent Next Steps blog post, “Can’t You Feel a Brand New Day?” Keith Jacobs paints a rosy picture of Florida’s education “marketplace,” where public schools and private scholarship programs supposedly work hand-in-hand to empower families. The imagery is bright, the promises are bold — but, like in 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, it’s worth pulling back the curtain. Behind the smoke and spectacle is not empowerment or freedom, but the quiet dismantling of public education.
School districts should not legitimize a system designed to undermine them. They should refuse to participate in Step Up’s marketplace. Selling courses and services turns schools into vendors in a competitive marketplace, diverting focus from their mission to serve every child. Districts must stand firm as providers of a public good, not just another supplier in a privatized system.
In his post, Keith Jacobs, who oversees “provider development” at Step Up for Students — Florida’s powerful voucher organization — demonstrates they are not simply content with diverting funds to private and homeschool programs. Jacobs’ job is to actively recruit elected school boards into their new “education marketplace,” a system designed to dismantle public schools and sell them off piece by piece. That is the “Brand New Day” he wants you to feel.
Is it a coincidence that Jacobs chose the song from “The Wiz” that echoes “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead”? Whether intentional or not, the choice suggests that public schools — the very foundation of our communities — are obstacles to overcome rather than institutions to be supported and improved.
As I recently wrote, privatization advocates like Jacobs and his Step Up companions use words like “personalization” and “customization” as cover for the unbundling and dismantling of public schools.
“Like a vulture capitalist stripping distressed companies for parts, proponents of ‘unbundling’ seek to break schools into pieces and sell them in an education marketplace.” https://accountabaloney.com/selling-floridas-public-schools-piece-by-piece/
This vision isn’t new. It traces back to Milton Friedman’s 1955 proposal to apply free-market principles to education, later championed by Jeb Bush and his allies. For more than 25 years, Florida lawmakers have expanded Friedman’s vision: building charter schools, broadening voucher programs, and now encouraging public schools themselves to sell courses off, piece by piece.
But public schools are not just another vendor in a marketplace. They are a cornerstone of democracy — built to serve every child, in every community, with transparency and accountability. Reducing them to “providers” competing for customers erodes their public mission and shifts the responsibility for education away from the community and onto individual families.
Choice may sound liberating, but markets always sort winners and losers. Families with resources — time, transportation, technology, and social capital — will navigate the maze of options. Vulnerable students, those with special needs, or those in rural and low-income areas are too often left with fewer, not better, opportunities.
The curtain conceals the reality: vouchers and marketplace schemes siphon funds away from neighborhood schools to subsidize private and often unregulated providers. These programs promise innovation, but more often deliver uneven quality, profit-seeking, and diminished public oversight. In public schools, accountability comes through elected boards and open meetings. In the marketplace, it disappears into the shadows.
What Florida families truly need is not a magic show of endless “choice,” but the guarantee that every neighborhood school is well-funded, safe, and staffed with qualified teachers. We should strengthen public schools, not hollow them out with illusions of competition.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends discover that the Wizard’s power was all smoke and mirrors. The true strength came from within the community itself — courage, heart, and wisdom. Florida should take that lesson to heart. Our children’s future depends not on dismantling public education into a marketplace, but on investing in the public schools that hold our communities together.