Sunday begins National School Choice Week, the annual seven-day period in the middle of winter when kids all over the country dream of either: (1) having the freedom to stay home from school on account of snow, or (2) moving to Florida.

Well, actually, kids dream of those things all the time.  But their parents ought to spend this week dreaming of Florida because the Sunshine State now boasts some of the most forward-looking school choice policies in the country.

In fact, last year a remarkable bipartisan coalition – which included most of Florida’s black and Hispanic state legislators – passed a major expansion of the Sunshine State’s landmark Tax Credit Scholarship Program.  This prompted The Wall Street Journal to marvel at “Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution.”

And last year, not coincidentally, Florida’s student achievement test scores continued to rise, catapulting the Sunshine State into the nation’s Top Five states in K-12 education, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual rankings.  (Not bad for a state that used to place in the bottom third of annual student achievement rankings.)

While there is much to celebrate in the Sunshine State’s schools, Florida still has its share of education policy problems.  For example, last year Florida’s politically-opportunistic former Governor (Charlie Crist) decided to curry favor with the powerful teachers’ unions by vetoing a merit pay for teachers’ bill that he had previously pledged to sign.

Crist’s political strategy ultimately backfired – he got trounced by Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate race.  Yet, interestingly, his flip-flop on merit pay would not have even won Crist the 2010 prize for Most Unseemly Behavior by a Floridian in the merit pay debate.

That dubious honor, sadly, would have gone to a government teacher at East Ridge High School in Clermont who sent the Florida Senate President a packet of nearly 100 letters – all of them opposing merit pay for teachers – which his students had written as a class assignment.  In a cover letter, the teacher claimed that he had presented the bill (S.B. 6) to the students with “a neutral connotation.”  And the teacher also expressed “total amazement” that every single one of his students wrote a letter opposing merit pay.

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UPDATE: Cost figures for the period 1970 through 1980 in the original version of chart 2, below, were inaccurate, and have been corrected in the revised version of the chart that appears below. This change does not affect the text of the article.

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Teachers unions, the Obama administration, and most Democrats in Congress want to spend another $23 billion that we don’t have to shore up public school employment. If we don’t go along, they tell us, it’ll be a “catastrophe” for American education. With fewer teachers our kids will supposedly learn less, further crippling our already wounded economy.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Over the past forty years, public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment (see chart). There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees. To prove that rolling back this relentless hiring spree by a few years would hurt student achievement, you’d have to show that all those new employees raised achievement in the first place. That would be hard to do… because it never happened.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for as long as we’ve been keeping track—all the way back to 1970. But we did get something in return for all that hiring: a great, big, fat, BILL.

If you graduated from high school in 1980, your entire k-12 education cost your fellow taxpayers about $75,000, in 2009 dollars. But the graduating class of 2009 had roughly twice that amount lavished on their public school careers. The extra $75,000 we’re now spending has done wonders for public school employee union membership, dues revenue, and political clout. It’s done a whole lotta nothin’ for student learning (see chart).

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