In an interview last month, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin revealed how excited he is about the charter school options in Miami, citing them as a reason he’s so excited his company now calls the city home.
The finance giant, based in Chicago for years, officially moved its headquarters to Miami in 2022. Its employee migration out of Chicago is ongoing, but as of 2025, most of its employees have made the exodus to South Florida.
One of the reasons Griffin cited for the move was the low quality of life in Chicago for his family and his employees — including Illinois’ struggling schools. As he explained in the interview: “There are some 50 schools in the state of Illinois where not a single child is at grade level.” And those districts are just the very worst of the bad performers.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why Florida is appealing to Ken Griffin as a headquarters for Citadel. Florida’s lack of a state income tax makes it a financially strategic decision. Miami’s crime rate is a small fraction of Chicago’s, making it a safer place for his employees to raise families: “There are more murders in Chicago on a bad weekend than there are in Miami in a year.”
But the education quality available to Citadel employees — and available to the surrounding community, which is a leading indicator on the quality of said community in years to come — is important enough to Griffin to be worth mentioning.
This is just another example of the second- and third-order effects of bad education policy. It’s basic cause and effect: if a school district delivers a poor quality education, residents with means will move to a better district. If schools in an entire region deliver a poor quality education, families, and indeed companies, will start moving out of the area altogether.
We’ve known for years that people move locally for schools. There’s a reason Zillow listings tout good school districts as a core part of their marketing. More recently, it has become clear that people take education policy into consideration when moving across longer distances too.
Jenny Clark, founder of Love Your School and proponent of Arizona’s school choice movement, says she regularly talks to parents who relocate to her state for its school choice options. Arizona’s school choice vouchers are particularly appealing to parents with special needs children (like Clark, who first used Arizona’s ESA vouchers to support her dyslexic son’s reading education). In many places, it’s hard to get support for students who don’t perfectly fit the conventional classroom mold; ESA vouchers allow parents to take matters into their own hands and find the very best resources without their local district as a gatekeeper.
Arizona was the first state to pass universal school choice (in 2022), so it’s had longer to accumulate data and monitor policy effects on its migration and economy. Other states have since followed suit, and while it’s too early to have clear data, the early indicators are clear: parents are paying attention, and they’re factoring school choice options as they decide where they want to live.
As Griffin revealed, corporations are paying attention, too.
In the interview, Griffin — who recently offloaded his downtown Chicago penthouses for a 44-percent loss as he cut ties with the city – voiced his excitement over what’s happening in Florida’s education market.
I was with the governor of the state of Florida a couple weeks ago, we welcomed the Success Academies to South Florida. They’re going to open several schools in the Miami area. There are hundreds of thousands of kids in the state of Florida who are in charter schools.
That number is likely to rise quickly once Success Academy opens its doors.
Success Academy is one of the shining lights of recent education innovation. A charter school network originally based out of Brooklyn (but quickly expanding into the rest of New York City, and now to new states), Success Academy was founded in 2006 by Eva Moskowitz, a former teacher and New York City Council member who was deeply troubled by the state of New York’s public schools.
Her first location, the Harlem Success Academy, quickly eliminated the achievement gap on standardized tests between its low-income students and those in the city’s top-performing public schools, attracting national attention. That performance trend has held even as the charter network has expanded to its current 57 locations.
Success Academy focuses on holding students to high standards, surrounding them in a culture of excellence, maintaining firm discipline, and delivering a strong academic curriculum. It has offered a world-class education to thousands of kids who would’ve otherwise been stuck in failing public classrooms. And now, its program is expanding to Miami.
This Success Academy announcement is just the latest in a long string of education moves happening in Florida. The state passed universal school choice in March of 2023, and since then, the state has seen an explosion of innovation. As one of the states with the least bureaucratic red tape for new schools, it has become a hotbed for innovation and entrepreneurship.
The state has seen myriad microschools and independent programs launch. It’s also become an incubator for networks working to expand on a national scale.
Primer, a network of K-8 microschools headquartered in San Francisco, based its early schools in South Florida because the state was so friendly to startup programs. Similar to Success Academy, Primer’s goal is to reach underprivileged kids who otherwise wouldn’t have high-quality options. Primer opens schools in areas it calls “school deserts” and brings choice into communities that only have a low-performing public school and no other private options.
Primer is quickly expanding, opening locations in other school choice states like Arizona, Alabama, and Texas. But for the time being, Florida remains its center of gravity, because Florida has been such a favorable state to work with.
Griffin voiced his excitement about the school choice culture in Florida.
Eva Moskowitz was blown away by one thing – everybody, everybody extended her the warmest of welcomes. We want her in Miami. We want our children to have the future that Success Academy will prepare them for…I mean, these will be kids that will go on from every socioeconomic background to have great careers and great lives because they had a great K-12 education.
This enthusiasm — from families, entrepreneurs, and perhaps most surprisingly corporations — is something politicians and lawmakers should be paying attention to. People are demonstrating that they’re willing to immigrate to good educational regions and emigrate from bad ones. Companies are considering education culture when choosing cities in which to open offices.
Parents want the best for their kids. Corporations want to move to strategic locations to attract top talent. And even with all the politics and bureaucracy as we have, states are, in a sense, competing in a market to attract residents and businesses, especially wealthy ones.
School choice policy will always be most exciting because of the possibilities it opens up for children. Nothing will ever compare to the shifts in life trajectory made possible by access to better schools, for kids who wouldn’t have had choice otherwise. But school choice policy is also an important thing to watch as an indicator of what states may be on the up and up, and which ones may be on the decline if they don’t stay competitive.
The post How School Choice Became a Magnet for Capital was first published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.
