Right now, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is reportedly on the short list for the vice presidential slot with Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. As a Pennsylvanian, a former public school teacher, and supporter of public education, I have mixed feelings about this.
In many ways, Shapiro has proven to be an effective governor. He’s practical; his administration has made a slogan out of Getting Stuff Done. When a major interstate bridge collapsed in June 2023, Shapiro mustered the necessary forces to get the overpass operating again in just twelve days. After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Shapiro responded quickly and thoughtfully—even the archconservative Washington Examiner reported that he “met the moment.”
In Pennsylvania, a state with a handful of solid blue cities surrounded by deep red rural stretches, political paralysis is not unusual. In the past twenty-one years, thirteen budgets have failed to pass on time.
But for supporters of public education, Shapiro remains problematic.
Shapiro ran for governor as a supporter of school vouchers. According to his campaign website, “Josh favors adding choices for parents and educational opportunity for students and funding lifeline scholarships like those approved in other states and introduced in Pennsylvania.”
It was a stance he did not back away from during his campaign, even though the numerous voucher plans introduced in Pennsylvania were consistently crafted by the GOP. In 2022, while Shapiro was running for office, the version on tap was an education savings account—a pile of taxpayer-funded money that families could spend as they wished, calculated with a formula that would have cost some districts more than their actual cost per pupil.
Pennsylvania already has a tax credit scholarship school voucher program, and it has produced striking discrimination against students based on religion, LGBTQ+ status, and, in at least one case, arbitrary reasons they don’t have to disclose to the family. Shapiro has stayed silent on the issue of voucher-enabled discrimination. As Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters PA, pointed out when testifying at a Democratic Policy Committee hearing in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives:
In his budget address, Governor Shapiro said, ‘It’s ridiculous that here in Pennsylvania two women can get married on a Sunday and fired from their job on a Monday, just because they’re in love.’ What Governor Shapiro left out is that the children of this couple could get kicked out of their private school on Tuesday. And that tax dollars are used to support this discrimination. Discrimination is a feature, not a bug, of school voucher programs.
Shapiro’s education transition team included several school choice supporters, such as Amy Sichel, the superintendent who drew flak for selling naming rights for a high school to Donald Trump buddy Stephen Schwarzman, and Joel Greenberg, co-founding partner of Susquehanna International Group with Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s most well-heeled, deep-pocketed activist for school vouchers.
Voucher supporters liked their chances with Shapiro. The 2023 version of the program was a more modest proposal, calculated to receive the governor’s approval, despite the fact it had little transparency and no accountability for what private education suppliers taught or to whom they chose to teach it. There was some heavy-duty lobbying involving emails between members of Shapiro’s administration and the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, according to The Keystone. But Shapiro used a line-item veto to ditch the vouchers in order to strike a budget deal.
Even so, he did not pronounce the vouchers dead, and labeled them, instead, as “unfinished business.” (The budget was only a month late).
In 2023, the state’s Democratic Party almost adopted an anti-voucher resolution, but then decided that it might make the party look divided going into the 2024 election.
Further complicating matters has been the February 2023 state court ruling that Pennsylvania’s inequitable school funding system is unconstitutional.
To fix the inequity, the legislature needs to come up with something in the neighborhood of $5 billion in additional funding to be directed to public schools. Despite the clear language of the ruling, voucher fans argued that fixing the public school funding system should involve more school choice.
Shapiro is a very clear communicator when he wants to be. It would have been simple to, at any point in the last eighteen months, say, “Because the court has found that we must fix public school funding, there will be no more talk about vouchers until that very expensive problem is fixed.”
Shapiro hasn’t done anything like that, and so the GOP continues to make an annual voucher pitch.