Musings on Pennsylvania’s failed school choice effort

One must wonder how a state with a Republican governor and with Republican majorities in both its House and Senate could fail to pass a school choice reform bill in 2011. Welcome to the wonderful world of Pennsylvania politics!

That’s just what happened in the last days of the last year when the much ballyhooed “Senate Bill 1”died a lonely death in Pennsylvania’s State House. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial over the New Year’s Day weekend that laid the blame squarely on Gov. Tom Corbett for lack of leadership. However, the embarrassing result was indeed more complicated than simple laxity on the part of the governor. Oh that was there, but the debacle had that certain ring attached to it of “only in Pennsylvania.” Here’s a brief digression into the political life of the Commonwealth, where I lived for the previous 13 years witnessing this political basket case. The state capitol is Harrisburg, which has made national headlines for not being able to pay its bondholders while teetering on the edge of insolvency. The city of Pittsburgh has spent most of the last few years in state receivership with pension and debt obligations swelling to more than half the annual budget. The city of Pittsburgh has not had a Republican city councilman since the 1930s, which was the last time also (coincidentally) that the city had any population growth.

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This leads us to Philadelphia where this school choice story surprisingly begins. Seems that a black legislator, a Democrat, mind you, had finally heard the cries of his oppressed constituents, whose children have been sentenced to failing schools for far too long and who have needed a way out despite the opposition of the arch-villain in all of this, of course, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, a.k.a., the teachers’ union, which has aggrandized itself at the expense of families without the money to send their children to private or parochial school. These non-public schools with limited resources have managed to graduate underprivileged children at comparable levels to the progeny of affluent families. This means that the teachers’ union in partnership with the Democratic Party commits the worst civil rights violation or our times. So how could school choice, on the march across the country and experiencing victories, too, most notably in Indiana fail this time in the Keystone State with a black Democratic state legislator and with all the other Republicans already mentioned ready to supposedly make it a slam dunk? First of all, the Pennsylvania Legislature is the largest per capita in the country with full-time pay for part-time work. Every year there are efforts to shrink this behemoth, but they always go nowhere. Once elected, these legislators tend to stay in office and eventually pull a significant pension. So they don’t want to lose their seats and perhaps the best way not to do that is to avoid making a powerful enemy in your district that can mobilize against you financially and electorally. In the end, who most to fear: the PSEA. But this time, the PSEA might have been neutralized because school choice appeared to have its stars aligning. But here’s why it did not pass, more than just the governor’s failure to lead: the bill was a bad bill with no consensus behind it, and having consensus is everything in Pennsylvania, the only state for example that still owns its liquor stores, because it can’t bring enough people together to change the situation. Also, Pennsylvania already has a quasi-school choice program in which businesses can pay corporate taxes into a fund that then distributes its proceeds to all private and parochial schools in the Commonweath, a program that has become both popular and successful. The school choice bill in Pennsylvania in 2011, however, provided money only to poor children in areas where there were failing schools. That meant no money for kids from middle class backgrounds in places where schools were not necessarily failing. So when the votes needed counting, the Republican legislators in Pennsylvania’s rural areas forgot about poor black children in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and recalled the potential impact of the teachers’ union in their own districts and thought, "good-bye cushy job and pension." And it was not just these rural Republicans who were upset. Many conservatives did not like the approach of “let’s pass something and at least we’ll have the camel’s nose under the tent.” No, they perhaps correctly wanted school choice for all, which is so necessary to getting education out of the hands of the government and back to American citizens. In conclusion, to get school choice to round two in Pennsylvania, the bill must not only have the governor’s strong backing, but also call for distributing taxpayer money to all parents so they can send their children to the schools of their choice, and not just to the unfortunate few – even though they need it the most.