PA Midterms and Education

We managed to dodge a couple of bullets in PA this time, but there's no reason to relax.

Doug Mastriano had threatened to chop education funding in half, and was likely to support every kind of gag order possible to bring public schools in line with christianist beliefs. But Mastriano ran an unusual campaign, deliberately ignoring traditional media and counting on the christianist network of social media and churches. It did not work out for him.

Fetterman vs. Oz was not that important from a public ed standpoint, but it sure was nail-biting entertainment. For a guy who built his empire as a media star, Oz was a terrible campaigner. You could easily convince me that some/all of his coms team simply hated him. Some of his unforced errors went national (crudite, anyone?), but his campaign was an endless supply of easy set-ups for Fetterman's team, right up until the final Sunday when he encouraged supporters to find him ten voters before the Steelers game, allowing Fetterman to point out what PA sports ball fans already knew--the Steelers had a bye and weren't playing that day.

Most interesting story of that campaign? It looks as if Fetterman's debate performance actually may have helped his campaign and stopped Oz's momentum.

The results were wonky. In my small rural county, folks went harder for Oz (64%) than Mastriano (61%), which I would not have predicted. Both of them were outperformed by the local House GOP candidates, which was less surprising (my dog could win an election here if he ran as a GOP dog). 

The other surprise is that the state House might flip Democrat. Even if it doesn't, that means the GOP won't have a super-control of the House. That's good news for education, as GOP reps repeatedly try to launch the same gag laws, anti-reading rights laws, and various forms of vouchers that have appeared in other states.

However--and it's a big however--one of those GOP voucher proposals for education savings accounts got the full-fledged support of Governor-elect Josh Shapiro during the campaign. Perhaps that was merely strategic (supposedly it help keep PA gazillionaire Jeffrey Yass from dumping a pile of money into the Mastriano campaign), but it bodes ill for public education in Pennsylvania. The only reason Shapiro looked okay on public education is that Mastriano looked spectacularly apocalyptic. But now groups like the teacher unions that supported Shapiro will need to shift gears and apply some education and pressure on his administration. And it remains to be seen if Shapiro will continue Governor Tom Wolf's long and fruitless attempt to reform charter and cyber-charter funding rules in the state. 

So things could look worse right now. We are not, thank goodness, Florida. But we are not Michigan, either, with its solid slate of public education supporters. The same debates that raged in previous years will keep raging next year, and public education supporters still have their work cut out for them. Catch your breath and let's get back to it.