PA Governor yields to teachers union on school choice.

Pennsylvania Governor Drops $100 Million School Vouchers Program After Opposition

In a significant turn of events, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has abandoned his previous demands for a $100 million school vouchers program from the state budget. This decision comes after facing fierce opposition from teachers unions and other Democrats.

The voucher program, which had the support of the Republican-controlled state Senate, encountered roadblocks in the Democratic state House. Despite the budget including several Democratic priorities such as increased education spending and state funding for legal defense, the voucher program faced strong resistance from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the largest teachers union in the state. This opposition caused the state budget to miss its June 30 deadline, prompting Shapiro to back down.

“Our Commonwealth should not be plunged into a painful, protracted budget impasse while our communities wait for the help and resources this commonsense budget will deliver,” Shapiro said. “Knowing that the two chambers will not reach consensus at this time to enact [the voucher program], and unwilling to hold up our entire budget process over this issue, I will line-item veto the full 0 million appropriation and it will not be part of this budget bill,” Shapiro said.

School choice emerged as a major issue in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race in 2022, second only to crime. State assessments revealed that in 2021, 78% of 8th-graders were not proficient in math and 47% were not proficient in language arts.

Earlier in the campaign, Shapiro broke ranks with many Democrats by expressing his support for “adding choices for parents and educational opportunity for students and funding lifeline scholarships like those approved in other states and introduced in Pennsylvania.” His Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, proposed his own voucher program that would have significantly cut education spending. Mastriano’s proposal was strongly denounced by the PSEA as “devastating.”

Shapiro’s preferred program, the Lifeline Scholarship, aimed to provide students from underperforming public schools with $7,000 in education vouchers to be used at a school of their family’s choice, including private schools. While the proposal garnered support from Republicans and some Democrats representing districts with struggling public schools, it was categorically rejected by most state Democrats, as well as teachers unions and other interest groups.

“PSEA is absolutely opposed to ‘lifeline scholarships’ or any other tuition voucher scheme,” Richard Askey, President of the PSEA, said as the budget deadline neared in late June. Citing a ruling from a Pennsylvania court that stated the state had “unconstitutionally” failed to fund schools in poor communities, Askey called the voucher program a “distraction” and a “terrible idea” that would interfere with the state’s constitutional mandate to educate its youth.

It is worth noting that in 2022, the PSEA made significant political contributions, donating over $1 million to Democratic candidates for the state legislature, as well as $775,000 to Shapiro and over $300,000 to Republican candidates.

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