Three weeks after the deadline, Pennsylvania still has not enacted its 2023-24 state budget. The budget bill was passed in both chambers of the state Legislature. But the path to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s desk for his signature was interrupted when state Senate Republican leaders departed the state Capitol in Harrisburg without finishing the final steps of the budget process.
They were angered by Shapiro’s eleventh-hour announcement that he would use his line-item veto to excise from the budget a $100 million private-school tuition voucher program called Pennsylvania Award for Student Success. The debate over school choice, the use of public money to enable students to attend private — including religious — schools, continues to rage in the commonwealth.
This is what we don’t understand: Republicans often refer to low-achieving public schools.
But they continue to resist funding public schools equitably, even after Commonwealth Court President Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer — who ran for the bench as a Republican — ruled in a landmark case earlier this year that students in “economically disadvantaged” schools were being deprived of the “comprehensive, effective, and contemporary” education guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Republicans often pontificate about the need for government to spend taxpayer dollars responsibly. But they seem eager to pour vast sums into private education without demanding accountability from private schools.
The Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program’s price tag is lofty. What would we get for that money?
We don’t know. Because Republicans don’t seem interested in building transparency requirements into proposals that boost school choice. Consider the contentious and continuing debate in Harrisburg over enacting stricter accountability standards for cybercharter schools.
This private-school tuition voucher program would be new. But the commonwealth’s existing educational tax credit program serves to illustrate the problem with funneling taxpayer dollars to private education.
The Educational Improvement Tax Credit and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit provide tax breaks — capped at $280 million annually — to businesses that contribute to nonprofits offering private-school tuition scholarships.
These educational tax credits are championed by school choice supporters as helping students in low-achieving school districts — though only the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit has that specific aim.
Last year, the nonpartisan newsroom Spotlight PA reported that the commonwealth’s educational tax credit program “operates with little accountability and lacks even the most basic data to determine if it’s actually effective.”
Spotlight PA continued: “The failures are not the result of poor oversight but rather an explicit effort by lawmakers to limit the information that is collected about the tax credit program.”
A report from the state’s Independent Fiscal Office found that among the 19 states that operate similar programs, Pennsylvania offered one of the largest tax credits, but collected the least number of data on outcomes.
Additionally, that fiscal watchdog found that the educational tax credit program’s qualifying income limitations for scholarship recipients were higher than all other states with such limitations.
And compared to other states, the Independent Fiscal Office found, Pennsylvania had “the highest allowance for administrative and other costs. This reduces the number of scholarships available to students.”
The watchdog noted that due to “the statutory limits on data that may be collected” related to the educational tax credits, it was unable to determine if they “substantially” enhance educational opportunities for Pennsylvania students. And it was “not possible to comment on whether state funds have been used effectively due to lack of general and specific outcome data.”
Despite these issues, the educational tax credit program — enthusiastically supported by Republican legislative leaders — has grown to more than nine times its original size in its two decades of existence, Spotlight PA noted.
So much for small government.
And months after that 2022 report was issued, the Republican-led state Legislature approved an additional $125 million for the program — the largest one-time funding increase since the program’s inception in 2001.
For so-called fiscal conservatives, Pennsylvania GOP legislative leaders seem pretty lax when it comes to programs promoted by school choice advocates.
Which doesn’t bode well for taxpayers’ interests should yet another gift to the school choice movement be signed into state law.
We must ask: Where are the audits of the effectiveness of these programs? How do we know if the students given scholarships to attend private schools saw improved educational outcomes?
School choice advocate Libby Sternberg points out that private schools lose students or even shut down if they fail. But that’s not a true measure of accountability. We should have some idea of what our taxpayer money will get us before lawmakers spend it.
And here’s the thing about private schools: Unlike public schools, they can be choosy about the students they accept — and retain.
As retired Hempfield School District superintendent Brenda J. Smoker wrote in a LancasterOnline column last year, “Public schools are the only educational institutions that are charged with providing services to all students. Whether a student has multiple, significant disabilities, or is an English language learner, or depends on school nursing services to clear out feeding tubes, public schools must be responsible. No private or religious school is held to this same requirement.”
What happens when a student fails to thrive educationally at a private school? Is it back to public school for that student? Because the private school isn’t required to keep that student enrolled.
Wouldn’t ensuring that public schools can serve all students effectively be the better option? Because right now, we’re gambling — with taxpayer money — on school choice programs that we don’t even know are working.
Show us evidence — statistical, not anecdotal, evidence — that children in “low-achieving” public school districts have been helped by these existing programs before spending $100 million on a new school voucher program.
In her February ruling, Judge Jubelirer cited Benjamin Franklin, who observed that an “investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
But an investment needs to be sound. It needs to be made in an entity that is subject to public audits, scrutiny and oversight. It needs to hold the best chance of paying dividends to the greatest number of Pennsylvanians. Public schools — for all their flaws and challenges — remain the best bet.
Imagine how much better they’d be if Republican state lawmakers fought for them as hard as they fight for school choice.
— LancasterOnline via TNS
