Most Democrats oppose school vouchers.
In fact, the national party officially opposes them as part of its stated platform.
However, the national party warned Pennsylvania State Democrats against adopting a formal resolution opposing vouchers because the Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, supports them.
The national party was afraid of appearing divided going into the 2024 election.
But it IS divided!
Stopping this resolution is what divided it.
If the Democrats wanted to actually be unified, they should have pushed for Shapiro to get on the same page as the rest of them. The national party’s position is X. He is pushing for Y.
The fact is Shapiro already broke with the party earlier this year by working with Republican senators to craft a $100 million school voucher program. However, after a tidal wave of Democratic push back, he eventually rejoined the group and vetoed that same program.
So – despite Shapiro’s grumblings – Democrats actually were united again against vouchers before the national party got involved.
The national Dems could have put pressure on the Governor to keep with the group. Instead they asked the majority of Democratic lawmakers to just hush until Donald Trump was defeated and Sen. Bob Casey was re-elected.
That’s not unity. It’s deception.
They’re cynically hoping no one reads the news and folks just button their lips about the continuing disagreement over this wasteful and discriminatory policy that they have allowed to fester.
Several Democratic committee members introduced the anti-voucher resolution at the party’s September meeting in order to both chastise the Governor and clarify the party’s continued commitment to public schools. They agreed to table it so the authors of the resolution could work with committee staff to remove direct criticisms of Shapiro.
However, the committee members who brought this forward said they’d continue to push for the state Democratic Party to affirm an explicit anti-vouchers stance at all future state committee meetings – even those during the Presidential election year. They did not consider this controversial because they were merely asking the state party to align its stance with the national party’s official platform.
Unfortunately, the problem goes much deeper.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have trouble supporting public schools while perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy of academic struggle.
The overwhelming majority of children in the state (and throughout the country) are public school students, but legislators will not adequately fund their schools.
Instead they waste $470 million every year on private and religious schools.
Lawmakers are Constitutionally required to fund public schools – not private and parochial schools – yet Democrat and Republican legislators BOTH support throwing your tax dollars away on something that isn’t their responsibility or yours.
The problem is there are at least two ways of doing this.
There are hush hush programs called Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs – school vouchers in everything but name.
Then there’s the idea first floated by Republican Gov. Tom Ridge in 1995 that every student should get a school voucher that could be used at a private or parochial school.
The low key programs are tax-credit scholarships that allow donors to pay less in taxes if they fund tuition for low income students at private schools. The full throated program could go to students regardless of parental income.
The former program already exists and is supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats. The later program is supported by nearly all Republicans and very few Democrats. It is the later which actually goes by the name of school vouchers.
So as nice as it would be to have all Democrats on the same page being against school vouchers, that would really just mean they were against anyone above the poverty line getting a voucher. Many of them would still be fine with poor kids getting subsidized to go to private and parochial schools.
In fact, just this year the General Assembly approved a 40% increase, or $150 million, to the state’s existing tax-credit scholarship programs as part of an expansive budget deal.
Republicans, angered by Shapiro’s veto of the voucher program he helped create, refused to go along with Democrats and add a single penny in funding to the Commonwealth’s impoverished public school system – Supreme Court ruling be damned!
PA lawmakers are determined to waste taxpayer dollars on private and parochial schools while starving the public school system they are required to support.
School vouchers are not a new idea. They’ve been tried and failed over and over again.
If we look at the facts, using a school voucher to go from a public school to a private one actually hurts kids academically.
Large-scale independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that students who used vouchers were as negatively impacted as if they had experienced a natural disaster. Their standardized test scores went down as much or more than students during the Covid-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
This should come as no surprise. When we give children school vouchers, we’re removing their support systems already in place.
They lose the friends, teachers, and communities where they grew up. It’s like yanking a sapling from out of the ground and transplanting it to another climate with another type of soil which may not be suited to it at all.
Moreover, vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.
School vouchers overwhelmingly go to kids who already attend private or parochial schools.
In the states that have released their data, more than three quarters of families who apply for vouchers for their children already send their kids to private schools. That’s 75% of voucher students in Wisconsin, 80% in Arizona, and 89% in New Hampshire. So these kids didn’t need our tax dollars in the first place. We’re just paying for services they’re already receiving.
Moreover, the very idea is absurd. If the school where the student is enrolled is struggling, why wouldn’t you simply invest in that school to make it better and fix the underlying problem? Why disrupt children’s educations by moving them to another school in another system that is entirely unproven, itself?
Vouchers are about exclusion – who gets to attend these PRIVATE schools – and indoctrination – what nonsense they can teach that public schools cannot.
Private schools can and do discriminate against children based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, special needs – you name it – even if those schools take public money.
For example, in Florida, Grace Christian School, a private institution that refuses to enroll LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools banning LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents! That’s roughly 1 out of every 10 private schools in the state with just this one discriminatory enrollment.
Meanwhile thousands of parochial schools that receive public funding use textbooks provided by The American Christian Education (ACE) group. This includes the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.
In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump/MAGA hits!
Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s a curriculum worthy of taxpayer dollars. I think if you’re going to take public money, you should have to accept all of the public, and you shouldn’t be allowed to teach counterfactual claims and prejudice as if they were fact.
That’s why Democrats should unequivocally oppose school vouchers of all types!
If lawmakers were making decisions based on facts instead of which policies will get them the most donations from wealthy special interests, this would be a no brainer.
As usual it is campaign contributions that are dividing the party – not popular policy.
State Democrats should pass an anti-voucher resolution today!
Like this post? You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.
Plus you get subscriber only extras!
Just CLICK HERE.
I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!
gadflyonthewallblog 
The United States must pass legislation that gets rid of the US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United.
Then pass serious campaign finance reform getting rid of dark money, To protect one vote for each eligible person, where money isn’t counted as people and someone like Mad Musk is one person instead of someone equal to a hundred million voices, with his bully pulpit on X and through the media that worships him as if he were a god and his toxic spittle spewed with his spoken words were drops of gold.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, yes, yes, and…many of those arguing for private schools want their kids to be in smaller classes. Adequately funding public schools could provide smaller classes…
LikeLike
I taught for 30 years (1975-2005). Class size average 34 for most of those years with a two year respite thanks to a grant, that allowed a few teachers at the high school where I worked for 16 of those years, to experience what it was like to work with 20 students a class. What an incredible experience. Being able to spend more time with the few students that needed it.
The first decade I taught in middle schools, six classes a day, no planning period. Our local union fought for years to get a planning period and only five classes to teach a day.
And finally got the planning period but not the class size reduction across the board.
Recently a house across the street from mine sold and a couple moved in and one was a grade school teacher. The husband worked for the county but not in education. Recently I asked her what class size she worked with.
She said 24.
The private school (Lakeside in Seattle) Bill Gates attended as a child and where his children went has 9 students for each teacher.
NINE!
Annual tuition is more than $40,000 for each student.
I crunched some numbers once and figured out I taught about 25 hours for a five day school week but worked 60 to 100 hours a week to get all the work done that could only happen outside of teaching time.
Teaching time is the tip of the iceberg.
What’s out of sight below water: Planning lesson, correcting student work, attending meetings outside of classroom time, calling parents, holding parent conferences, standing duty outside of classroom time and sometimes on the weekend monitoring sports games, taking approved after school hour workshops and classes to keep our teaching credentials active so we don’t lose our jobs, NEVER ends until you retire, get fired or die. I took a box of work home every night and on the paid holidays (that do not include summer unless you teach summer school) I worked at home more than I did in my classroom. Summer is not a paid holiday. If teachers get a check during the summer months, that means their annual salary (without overtime) is spread out over 12 months instead of 10. The salary’s the same 12 months or 10.
Teachers get paid the same salary no matter how many hours they work to get their job done. Those after school duties were not paid for. They were part of the salary. There are some extra voluntary teaching jobs that come with an additional stipend but it isn’t easy to get teachers to volunteer to add more hours to the workload they already have.
For about seven years during the last decade of my teaching career, I agreed to include one of those stipend paid duties as the advisor for the high schools student newspaper. That after school activity meant sometimes arriving at school at 6:00 AM when the parking lot gates were unlocked and not going home until 11:00 PM when the alarms were turned on and we had to leave. The stupid wasn’t much and it didn’t not include overtime.
LikeLike