A 2021 law let Florida colleges sponsor charter schools. Four institutions now do. We had coded one of them "nothing found" — because we read its course roster and stopped.
Florida is the state this Index covers most heavily, and the state whose headline finding is the starkest: the most portable education money in America, and not one education-school program built for the sector it funds. That finding still stands.
What we missed is that a second pathway opened alongside it. A 2021 statutory change let Florida College System institutions sponsor charter schools within their service areas, and state universities sponsor them statewide. Four Florida institutions are now approved sponsors: Tallahassee State College, first approved in January 2023, which went on to open the first college-sponsored charter school in the state; Miami Dade College, whose board approved its first six charter applications in February 2026; Pasco-Hernando State College, which issued its first charter to a school that had spent a decade under the Pasco County school board; and the University of West Florida.
Miami Dade College went furthest. It does not merely sponsor — it powers the Florida Charter Institute, whose authorizing division reviews applications and conducts oversight on behalf of other higher-education authorizers, Pasco-Hernando among them. One college now runs the apparatus the others use.
Every one of these moves happens outside the college of education. That is the same pattern the Index found in Michigan, in Arizona and in Indiana, and it is the pattern the Index was built to catch.
Which makes our error the point of this note. We coded the University of West Florida Tier 0 — nothing found — on the strength of its School of Education roster, which contains nothing built for the sector. UWF is listed as an approved sponsor in the Florida Department of Education's own directory, and its trustees approved it as authorizer of a Somerset Academy charter school. We made the catalog-scan mistake that this Index exists to correct, in our best-covered state.
The row is recoded and Correction 02 is permanent. The method has changed too: for every state, the official sponsor or authorizer registry is now checked before any institution can be coded Tier 0. That one change is what surfaced Miami Dade and Pasco-Hernando.
The limit worth carrying. Twenty-five Florida state colleges are not sponsors and their education units remain unscanned. A college can build a program without ever holding a charter, so the coverage gap has narrowed and changed shape rather than closed. And for Miami Dade and Pasco-Hernando, this note codes the authorizing move only — neither education unit has been enumerated to our standard, and we make no claim about their teaching programs in either direction.
Cite as: When Money Follows the Child. Florida built a second door, and we walked past it. Field Note 06, August 2026. https://www.whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org/notes/06/ Accessed [date].