The Obstacles To More School Vouchers In Pennsylvania

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.