Philadelphia students lose out on academic work necessary for their long-term success because they spend part of their school day navigating through unsafe environments, a college freshman told lawmakers as part of ongoing testimony from school choice advocates that will continue through December.
“Hundreds of thousands of kids are not being educated properly, which contributes to our city’s growing violence,” observed Jaslin Vasquez-Gonzalez, a St. Joseph’s University student, while addressing members of the Pennsylvania House Education Committee. “They are not being given a place where they feel safe, so they end up in the streets where they are more likely to be put in jail or killed.”
Joining Vasquez-Gonzalez, parents, teachers, and administrators also testified and shared their vision for expanded educational opportunities benefiting students who cannot afford private school tuition without financial assistance. That’s why they are encouraging elected officials to move forward with the proposed Lifeline Scholarship Program, referred to as the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success (PASS) in the current state budget impasse. The school choice program would offer Education Opportunity Accounts (EOAs) to students attending public schools that the state ranks in the bottom 15 percent of standardized testing.
If passed, Lifeline Scholarships could have what Andrew Brady, president of the West Catholic Preparatory High School, describes as a “transformative“ influence on Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable students. Keemah Brewington, a Philadelphia parent, anticipates that the scholarships would “force public schools to take a hard look at their own system.”
Surveys show that these scholarship advocates speak on behalf of a broad cross section of Pennsylvania residents, according to EdChoice, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit that supports school choice. The latest polls find that 70 percent of all Pennsylvania adults and 75 percent of Pennsylvania parents support the proposed EOAs, also known as Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), that are teetering on the precipice of becoming law in the Keystone State in time for the next school year.
Union Power as a Perpetual Obstacle
Standing in opposition to this vision of school choice is a narrow but well-funded network of public employee unions and special interest groups from inside and outside Pennsylvania.
Although the state Senate passed “fiscal code legislation“ that included Lifeline Scholarships/PASS, the Pennsylvania House — under the leadership of House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, a Montgomery County Democrat — has resisted bringing the proposal to the lower chamber’s floor. Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to advance legislation that omits the Lifeline Scholarship/PASS proposal. The state budget remains incomplete until the two bodies agree on the fiscal code.
Campaign finance records show that in the most recent cycle for 2023, 92 percent of government union donations went to Democrats, with Bradford receiving $66,000 and the House Democratic Campaign Committee receiving $226,000.
Since 2007, government unions have spent more than $203 million on campaigns and political activities, making them the top interest group in Harrisburg, according to an analysis of campaign spending data from the Commonwealth Foundation, a free market think in Harrisburg.
Democrats hold just a one-seat majority of 102–101 in the Pennsylvania House. Yet Sen. Kim Ward, the president pro tempore of the state Senate and a Westmoreland County Republican, does not view the Lifeline Scholarships/PASS proposal as a partisan issue. She estimates about 30 House Democrats would vote yes if given the chance.
But Ward is also quick to point out that time is a factor for students poised to benefit from the scholarships. “They can’t just wait for years on end while their current schools underperform,” she said.
In reality, the Lifeline Scholarships/PASS Program amounts to what Marc LeBlond, a policy analyst with EdChoice, views as a “modest proposal,” especially compared to what’s in motion in other states. He expects the dam to eventually break in favor of parents keeping more of their tax dollars for educational purposes despite union opposition.
If approved, the scholarships would funnel through the state treasury as restricted-use spending accounts. Qualifying parents with students in the worst-performing schools could redirect their tax money toward private school tuition and other approved educational expenses, such as tutoring services and instructional materials.
Under the bill that passed the state Senate, K–8 students would receive $5,000 annually, high school students would receive $10,000, and all special needs students would receive $15,000.
Roughly 250,000 students attend Pennsylvania’s lowest-achieving schools, making them eligible for Lifeline Scholarships/PASS.
“The advantage of the Lifeline proposal is that you are directly helping the kids who urgently need help right away,” LeBlond said. “The downside is that you are leaving out some kids who also need help.”
There are 13 states with ESA programs benefitting more than 92,000 students, according to EdChoice. LeBlond counts 10 states with universal or near-universal programs where all or nearly all K–12 students are eligible.
“Pennsylvania sits in an interesting place politically and geographically,” LeBlond continued. “It’s a purple state with a blue governor, so passing a program like this is certainly a big deal from a historical perspective since Pennsylvania could be the corridor for additional school choice initiatives in the northeast. It borders Ohio and West Virginia, which have universal education savings accounts programs, but it also borders New Jersey and New York, which don’t have any of these programs.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who took office in January, could potentially be an ace in the hole for the school choice movement since he openly campaigned for Lifeline Scholarships. But while Shapiro has presidential ambitions, LeBlond sees the governor putting himself in a position where he will run counter to popular opinion in his home state and across the country until he makes good on his campaign promise.
“[Shapiro] hasn’t done any of the heavy lifting that’s required to actually execute this program and get it across the finish line in Pennsylvania,” LeBlond said. “We had massive expansion for educational opportunities in 2023, with the ESAs especially, going like gangbusters. In 2022, participation was about 33,000. We’ve tripled this in 2023, and that figure is now set to triple or quadruple in 2024. So, we’ve really hit an exponential moment for ESAs.”
Shapiro, who received more than $5.5 million from government unions during last year’s gubernatorial race, vetoed an appropriation for the scholarships last August when he could not come to terms with his own House Democrats. The state budget has been in limbo since then.
Lessons From West Virginia
With Lifeline Scholarship/PASS advocates preparing for another push in the General Assembly this December, Jamie Buckland — the founder and executive director of West Virginia Families United for Education — a nonprofit group that favors a wide range of public and private school options, has some insight and advice built on her own experiences.
All West Virginia K–12 students leaving public schools are eligible to receive an ESA under the Hope Scholarship Program, which was enacted in 2021 and implemented in 2022. The scholarships are equal to 100 percent of the prior year’s statewide average net state aid allotted per pupil based on net enrollment, amounting to about $4,500 for the 2022–23 school year.
The introduction of ESAs coincided with the boon of educational alternatives, such as public charter schools, parental learning pods (where families pool their resources), and “microschools“ that involve smaller classrooms often led by parents that typically meet two or three days a week.
“West Virginia is a state that went from zero to 60 with all of these programs launching in the same year,” Buckland said. “Once implementation got under way, we began to make note of strategies to improve the program. There were equal protection issues for some students concerning access to athletics, therapies, and to career and technical schools. Without a sufficient feedback loop, parents and providers didn’t feel heard, leaving them quite frustrated. With these things in mind, I think there are definitely benefits to the kind of incremental programming Pennsylvania is considering. This provides administration time and space to not be overwhelmed with implementation. I think other states, like Pennsylvania, can use our experience as an example to see how outreach and engaging parents can have a substantial impact on participation.”
While the opponents of school choice often point to existing charter and private schools to suggest that alternatives to traditional schools are already in place, Buckland argues that they leave a lot out of their equation.
“I think it is naïve to believe that families today, after the learning gaps and disruptions so many experienced with the pandemic, are already being served sufficiently with the options currently in place,” Buckland said. “I’m in southern West Virginia, where you can drive up to an hour to get to the closest private school, but now families are using the scholarship to launch new unconventional models right in their community. To me, programs like Hope Scholarship have the potential to improve outcomes beyond what is tied to K–12 education. It’s taking parents, who have traditionally been passive recipients, and positioning them to be active decision-makers. That has a cultural impact.”
Pennsylvania already has two popular tax credit scholarship programs: the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC). Both the EITC and OSTC offer businesses and individuals tax credits for donations to state-approved organizations that grant scholarships to students for private school tuition. So, the state is not starting from ground zero.
However, arbitrary state caps on the tax credits limit the amount of donations. In the 2020–21 school year, the commonwealth turned away 76,000 student scholarship applications while putting more than $156 million in donations on hold.
In November, the Pennsylvania Senate advanced a bill that included a $150 million increase for the tax-credit scholarships, the largest increase since their inception. But the dysfunctional House Democrats, true to form, blocked this investment. Even as the teacher unions continue to exert pressure on lawmakers who are beholden to their donations, they could experience diminishing returns as the public appetite for new education avenues continues to grow, suggests Mike Watson, an analyst with the Capital Research Center who tracks how foundation, charities, and other nonprofits invest in political advocacy.
Watson points to examples of school choice initiatives in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and New Orleans to drive home the point that broad public support can transcend recalcitrant elected officials and union leaders who spend funds on political causes their own members do not necessarily support. The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), an affiliate of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country representing about three million public employees, stands out from other government unions spending more than $27 million since 2007.
In that same period, the PSEA also spent $54.8 million in membership dues on political activities and lobbying, according to Form LM-2 financial disclosure the union files with the Department of Labor. This money is almost exclusively for liberal organizations, often ones that oppose educational choice. Keystone Research Center, a left-wing anti-choice organization in Pennsylvania, received over $120,000 in membership dues from the PSEA over the past two reporting periods.
“In the liberal soul is the belief that government can fix the problems,” Watson said. “And when the government gets in the way of solving problems, this causes a cognitive dissonance … so that, even in a state like Pennsylvania, that is pro-union and has union bones, the unions can only maintain their position on an issue like education for so long, and they might find that they have limits on their power.”
That’s certainly the view of Rep. Joe D’Orsie, a Manchester Republican, who has just introduced a bill that would add Pennsylvania to the list of states that have universal programs. Going into 2024, it is evident Pennsylvania sits at the epicenter of the battle over parental rights and educational freedom.
Kevin Mooney is the Senior Investigative Journalist at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank, and writes for several national publications. Follow him on X at @KevinMooneyDC.
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