National
Review Online
Friday,
July 07, 2023
It looked
as though Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) might stand up to
powerful parts of his own party and enact a form of school choice. The Pennsylvania Lifeline
Scholarship Program would be available to students in poorly performing public
schools, providing families with state funding that could be used to pay for
private education.
Before
he was elected in 2022, Shapiro spoke
favorably about
Lifeline Scholarships on the campaign trail. His education
secretary told
the Pennsylvania legislature during his confirmation hearings that Shapiro
“favors adding choices for parents and education opportunity for students and
funding Lifeline Scholarships as long as those choices do not impact school
district funding.” Shapiro went on Fox
News two weeks
ago and defended school choice.
Pennsylvania
has a divided legislature, with Republicans controlling the senate and
Democrats holding a one-seat majority in the house. The senate passed a budget
appropriating $100 million for the Lifeline Scholarship Program while also
increasing funding for public schools. Democratic house leadership said it
would not pass the budget with the school-choice program included.
Pennsylvania’s new fiscal year began on July 1 without a budget. House
leadership opposition came despite the fact that some Pennsylvania Democrats
support school choice, and only one house member had to flip to pass the
budget.
State
senator Tony Williams, a Democrat from Philadelphia, is a strong proponent of
the Lifeline Scholarship Program and crossed party lines to vote for it. “Guess
what? Those of us who have means, who are elected, send our kids to private
schools, parochial schools, and magnet schools,” said Williams in a June
29 speech in the senate, pointing out
that not one neighborhood high school in Philadelphia meets average levels of
proficiency. “I express myself as only a humble plea that, tonight, we do
something on behalf of those thousands of parents [who] can’t afford to do it
themselves.”
This
could have been an opportunity for Shapiro to exert some influence as governor.
Shapiro is extremely popular, having won bipartisan praise for his speedy
response to a truck accident that damaged a heavily traveled overpass on I-95
in Philadelphia. In 2022, he campaigned as a different kind of Democrat
who would not be captive to his party’s progressives and would focus on
everyday issues, such as education, and he comfortably defeated a Republican
whose embrace of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election was of a piece with his
general disconnection from reality.
But when
it came time to actually take a stand, Shapiro did what a typical Democrat
would do: He sided with the unions. The Pennsylvania affiliates of the National
Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, the
AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Pennsylvania
Building and Construction Trades Council ganged up on Shapiro and released
a letter denouncing the school-choice
program.
Shapiro announced he would resolve the budgetary
impasse by line-item-vetoing the Lifeline Scholarship Program, despite saying
that he still supports it.
Democrats
are the party of government, both in the philosophical sense that they see more
government as the solution to problems and in the straightforward sense that
government employees are their political supporters. If the government unions
and their allies want to defeat Shapiro in the Democratic primary in 2026, they
would command an army of volunteers and receive millions of dollars from around
the country to do so.
In a
split within his party, Shapiro had a choice: Side with the better policy or
side with the people who have the capability to crush him in a primary
election. For a politician, the choice is obvious. For Pennsylvania’s poor
students, the choice is shameful.
No comments:
Post a Comment