A conservative Pennsylvania political group said expanded educational choice should be part of a suite of options aimed at improving access to quality education as Gov. Josh Shapiro and lawmakers respond to a court ruling on educational equity in the next state budget.
Nathan Benefield, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation, said on a call with reporters Wednesday that while Shapiro still supports the taxpayer-funded private school scholarship program he championed during his campaign, Benefield would like to see it finalized as part of the 2024-25 budget.
“We want to see what he proposes in this budget for school choice,” Benefield said. “Traditionally, school choice programs have been a financial benefit to the state, charging much less per student and accounting for only a small fraction of what we spend on education.”
Shapiro is scheduled to deliver his second budget speech on Feb. 6, which comes after his administration’s first budget cycle, when negotiations were suspended for months after a $100 million deal with Senate Republicans lifeline scholarship program collapsed.
The Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program would target students from the state’s poorest 15 percent of school districts, increasing available funding to provide families with alternatives to struggling public schools.
As part of a compromise when budget negotiations were finalized in December, lawmakers agreed to enhance by $150 million the state’s Educational Investment Tax Credit and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit programs, which redirect tax dollars in the form of corporate tax credits to private scholarship organizations, although only a fraction of the available money goes to students from low-performing schools.
Complicating the education portion of the budget is a state court order to close the funding gap between Pennsylvania’s wealthiest and poorest school districts. Commonwealth Court Chief Justice Renee Cohn Jubelirer ruled last February that the state’s reliance on property taxes to fund education puts students in less-affluent school districts at a disadvantage.
A judge has ruled Pennsylvania’s K-12 public school funding system unconstitutional. What’s next?
A bipartisan commission that heard testimony from teachers, students and other stakeholders from across the state last year he accepted the offer this month to give all school districts equal rights within seven years. The proposal includes spending $5.4 billion to close the gap between the state’s most successful districts and those that lag behind, as well as another $4.2 billion in annual increases for basic education, building maintenance and tax breaks for the heaviest-taxing districts.
Benefield said on Wednesday that the Commonwealth Foundation had recommended that the Basic The Education Funding Commission said the court order could be enforced if a larger share of state education spending were allocated to an equitable funding model that the state adopted in 2015.
Currently, only about 25% of the state’s education budget is allocated to districts using a formula. The rest is distributed as a base amount to each district under a policy called “hold harmless,” which prevents funding from being reduced regardless of changes in the student population.
Shapiro said he still supports the scholarship plan he touted during the campaign, but to get it done he will need to broker a deal between Senate Republicans, who supported it last year, and House Democrats, who have blocked legislation supporting it.
During the Q&A session in Pennsylvania Press Club Lunch The lead House Democratic budget negotiator said Monday that he believes a quality education includes all options available to Pennsylvania families, including private education.
As vouchers, charter schools and online schools are all under reassessment, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) said achieving equity in funding for customary public schools must be a priority.
Harris’ counterpart in the minority Republican Party in the House of Representatives, Rep. Seth Grove (R-York), said in a statement that a priority in the upcoming budget cycle must be to control spending to address the problem The structural deficit of $1.83 billion is the difference between the approved spending of $45 billion in the current budget and The state is expected to generate revenue of $43 billion.
