I hate to say this to you, RWP, but as a resident of this state, there is no tradition of strong support for rigorous public education as there is in, say, much of the American midwest. Florida was a cracker state at one time with a relatively small native population. We had a seasonal population of tourists, sharecroppers, circus people, studio people, and later, space people. But we never developed an ethic of strong tax support for public schools here. This applies to both parties. During the Administrations of Reuben Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, public education was a warehousing system by which children were shuffled on from one grade to the next. The population explosion that began after 1957 did not bring with it an accompanying consensus to raise taxes to keep pace with all the kiddies that were coming in from Indiana, Michigan, and New York.
Florida was a retirement state after all. All those FDR Democrats figured that the kids were someone else's problem, not theirs.
This was at a time when California boasted the best educational system in the country (while Reagan was governor and CA was a two party state, and before CA spent itself into penury). Meantime, Florida's educational system was the living embodiment of Plessey vs. Ferguson up to the mid-1980's.
Believe me, I don't blame you for avoiding Florida like the plague. This state has pretensions to greatness, but they are only that. Of course, CA was great. Once.
Be Seeing You,
Chris