(10/25/2025) For years, Florida Republicans have championed school vouchers as the crown jewel of educational freedom — a program that now funnels more than $3 billion annually to over 2,000 private campuses across the state. The vast majority are Christian. Islamic schools have participated in the program too, for years, without controversy.

Now, top Florida Republicans want them out.

As the Orlando Sentinel reported this week, Attorney General James Uthmeier and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson are publicly calling for stripping taxpayer funding from Islamic schools, claiming they “promote sharia law.” Their campaign — which appears coordinated with a national push by the congressional Freedom Caucus to defund Islamic schools participating in voucher programs — exposes a glaring double standard at the heart of Florida’s school choice movement: the choice was never meant to include everyone.

Florida has had a voucher program for decades. Two years ago, Republican lawmakers made it universal, opening it to essentially any student in the state. More than 300,000 students used vouchers last year to attend 2,278 private campuses, according to Step Up for Students, which administers the program, as the Sentinel reported. The overwhelming majority of participating schools are Christian. Roughly two dozen are Islamic, according to the state education department.

Those roughly two dozen schools are now being targeted for removal — not because of any documented violation, but because of their faith.

Uthmeier posted on social media that “the use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security,” according to the Sentinel. He was reposting a video originally published by an anti-Muslim organization, apparently shot at a Tampa-area Islamic school. The Sentinel reported that Uthmeier’s office did not respond when asked to provide examples of Shari’a law being promoted in voucher-funded schools or explain how religious instruction at those campuses differs from what happens at hundreds of Christian schools in the same program.

Simpson, who as Senate President made expanding the voucher program one of his top legislative priorities, was equally direct. “Schools that indoctrinate sharia law should not be a part of our taxpayer-funded school voucher program,” he wrote on social media. This is the same official who in 2021 said he wanted “school choice to be an option for every family,” as the Sentinel noted.

Every family, it turns out, did not include Muslim ones.

The Sentinel’s own reporting over the past decade tells the story of who has actually benefited without scrutiny. As columnist Scott Maxwell documented, the paper’s “Schools without Rules” investigation — ongoing since 2017 — has exposed Christian voucher schools where teachers lacked degrees or had criminal records, where curriculum taught that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, where gay students were banned, gay teachers were fired, and children with disabilities were turned away. More than 20,800 students attended 156 private Christian schools with explicitly anti-gay policies using taxpayer-funded vouchers, the Sentinel reported in 2020. None of that triggered calls for investigation from the Attorney General.

But approximately 24 Islamic schools? That was too many.

Shari’a — which translates from Arabic as “the path” or “the way” — is a religious and ethical code rooted in the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Much like Halakha in Judaism, Shari’a guides Muslims in everyday life, including matters of prayer, charity, dietary practices, inheritance, and personal conduct. Its interpretations vary widely across cultures and schools of thought.

The selective outrage comes amid a broader anti-Muslim legislative push in the state. Rep. Hillary Cassel, a Broward Republican who switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP last December citing insufficient support for Israel, has introduced legislation to ban Shari’a law in Florida courts — a bill she filed on the anniversary of October 7 and explicitly tied to her solidarity with Israel. And the effort is not confined to Tallahassee: the congressional Freedom Caucus, after learning that a Muslim-run school in Tennessee participated in that state’s voucher program, declared that “taxpayer dollars should not be going to Islamic schools.”

Hiba Rahim, deputy executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel that the targeting of Islamic schools is both discriminatory and unconstitutional. The First Amendment, she noted, forbids the government from establishing an official religion or favoring one faith over another.

Muslim parents, Rahim told the Sentinel, send their children to Islamic schools for exactly the same reasons Christian parents choose Christian schools — to preserve values important to their families.

Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, a past president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, described Uthmeier’s stance as “bigoted” in comments to the Sentinel. He noted that Florida leaders are quick to attack what they characterize as Shari’a law but remain silent on the role of canon law or Jewish jurisprudence in religious schools receiving the same public funding.

Florida’s voucher program was built with minimal oversight of what religious schools teach — that was the point. For years, Christian schools operated without question. Islamic schools participated in the same program under the same rules. The alarm bells only started ringing when Republican leaders decided that Muslim participation in a program designed for everyone was a national security threat.

The question Florida’s leaders have answered — whether they intended to or not — is simple: was this ever really about school choice? The record says no.