Pennsylvania
The Obstacles To More School Vouchers In Pennsylvania
WILKES-BARRE, PENNSYLVANIA – AUGUST 30: Pennsylvania Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate … [+]
In a recent Broad and Liberty (”thought-provoking and shareable ideas for free thinkers in Greater Philadelphia and beyond”) post, Guy Ciarrocchi argues that opponents of the Pennsylvania’s newest school voucher proposal are simply afraid that it will work.
Ciarrocchi is a fellow with the right-tilted Commonwealth Foundation, which has long pushed for school vouchers in Pennsylvania. He was also executive director of the PA Coalition of Public Charter Schools (2009-2011). So his position on vouchers is not a surprise.
He’s a good representative of the frustration conservatives are feeling over Governor Josh Shapiro’s declaration that he will scrap the voucher item in the budget, despite pressure from many conservatives, who really thought they had a shot this time. An entire dark money organization, Commonwealth Action, has popped up just to continue pressure on Shapiro to okay vouchers.
Ciarrocchi sums up the standard argument, which is that public school supporters oppose vouchers because they’re afraid of them, and there is some truth to that in the same way that one might be afraid that building a warming fire in the middle of your living room will burn down the house (the pro-voucher counterargument is that if you built a better house, you wouldn’t have to worry about fire).
But there are more issues at play here.
One is that the vouchers simply won’t deliver on what their supporters promise.
If policy makers are truly worried about rescuing students from “failing” schools, they should address other barriers to such escape, most notably the high cost of private school tuition and the selectivity of those schools, neither of which is addressed by the proposed voucher system. Private schools under this proposed system would still be free to accept or reject students as they wish, and charge whatever tuition they deem appropriate, no mater how much that cost exceeds the voucher amount. Both of these are appropriate positions for a private business, but they also represent large obstacles to students who wants to “escape.”
Pro-voucher proponents will argue that the market will produce additional private schools that can meet the new demand. But the proposed program includes no means of accountability or oversight to insure that those pop-up schools are any better than the schools the students are escaping.
Nor does the proposal address the issue of those left behind. If the school is so bad that some students must be rescued from it, why are we only rescuing a few, while leaving the rest—the majority—in a school that now has even fewer resources to provide for them.
Supporters argue the new voucher program, carefully designed to meet Governor Shapiro’s requirements, does not take money from public schools.
Proponents point out that the GOP’s Senate budget bill proposes the highest basic funding ever for education in PA, and that is true (though it’s now as much as the governor or the House asked for). But it is also true that the $100 million proposed for the new voucher fund is accompanied by a $125 million cut in Level Up funding, the money being used to try to even up Pennsylvania’s wildly unequal school funding system. The Senate proposal also zeros out the $100 million requested by the governor for mental health block grants at a time when student mental is considered a major issue.
One can argue that what the left hand takes and the right hand gives have nothing to do with each other, but at the end of the day, an additional $100 million in the budget has to come from somewhere, and it will most likely come either from somewhere that affects students or from taxpayers, or both.
Ultimately, the debate over the voucher item in the budget parallels the debate over the bill aimed at cyber charter reform. Rather than simply declaring, “We believe that maintaining multiple high quality parallel school systems is so important that we are going to raise taxes to do it,” legislators continue a zero sum game that results in those multiple systems and their supporters fighting over the same pot of funds—a pot that the court has already ruled inadequate to operate the single public system that we have.
 "Trump to hold rally in Erie as Pennsylvania becomes key 2024 battleground")
Of the seven competitive states that both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, have a realistic shot at winning, Pennsylvania is the most populous and awards the most votes in the Electoral College, which in turn is used to select the overall winner of the election.
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Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate is set to hold a rally in Pennsylvania today, his fourth campaign stop in the state this month. Erie, located in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, will host the former president at 2 pm local time.
This rally comes one month after his running mate, US Senator JD Vance held a similar event in the same city. Trump has another rally scheduled in western Pennsylvania for October 5.
Pennsylvania has emerged as a crucial battleground state in the 2024 election, with many of Trump’s allies considering it the most important state to win. The state’s significance stems from its large population and the substantial number of electoral votes it awards, making it a critical factor in determining the overall winner of the election.
In fact, among the seven competitive states that both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have a realistic chance of winning, Pennsylvania stands out as the most populous and electorally valuable.
Trump allies broadly believe that if the former president beats Harris there, he is likely to return to the White House. But if Trump loses to Harris in Pennsylvania, the vice president has the inside track, in their opinion.
In a reflection of the stakes, Harris and Trump have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in Pennsylvania in the months before the election, more than any other state in both gross and per capita terms.
Erie, the site of Trump’s rally, is a battleground inside a battleground. Erie County is one of two Pennsylvania counties that favored Trump in the 2016 election against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton before favoring President Joe Biden against Trump in 2020.
Trump narrowly won the state and the election overall in 2016, before losing both in 2020.
This time around, Pennsylvania is again competitive, according to surveys. Harris leads Trump by 1.6 percentage points in the state, according to an average of polls maintained by polling and analysis website FiveThirtyEight. That difference is well within almost all polls’ margin of error.
Trump’s next rally in Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, will take place in Butler, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Erie. That town was the site of a failed assassination attempt on Trump in July. A bullet grazed the former president’s ear.
With inputs from agencies.
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