PA: Bad Voucher Bill on Fast Track

The folks at Education Voters of Pennsylvania report that GOP leaders have made a voucher plan one of their big priorities for the 2023-2024 state budget. It's a bad bill.

HB 795 is the latest version of the Lifeline Scholarship Program, a bill that has been kicking around Harrisburg for several years. But the new version includes some significant changes from past years.

Last year, it was HB 2169. That version of the Lifeline voucher was an education savings account, a chunk of money that parents could spend on all sorts of education-flavored products and services. HB 2169 was a bad idea for many reasons (for one thing, the dollar amount was based on state-wide average spending per pupil, meaning many districts would have lost way more money than their usual cost per pupil). But the bill also had a few safeties in place, like a requirement that every single account must be audited every two years and a restriction that families couldn't double dip by taking both a Lifeline scholarship and a EITC voucher (the state's long-existing tax credit scholarship voucher program).

The new version of Lifeline vouchers is a traditional voucher; it's money that can be spent on tuition at a private school and "school-related fees." Getting accepted by that private school is, of course, your problem.

The restriction against double dipping is not in this bill; families would now be free to grab multiple piles of taxpayer dollars. Nor are there any income requirements; if you're wealthy, you can still grab a voucher or two. The voucher is still designated for all students in schools at the bottom 15% of schools, a super-cynical approach, since no matter how well schools are all doing, there will always be a bottom 15%.

The "nonpublic" schools accepting vouchers do not have to be vetted in any way; it just has to notify the state, promise to be non-profit (it can, of course, still be run by a for-profit entity), and comply with non-discrimination laws. It can thrown out of the program if it "routinely" fails to comply with those requirements and if it fails "to provide a scholarship recipient with the educational services" the voucher paid for. 

The bill does have the usual non-interference clause-- the nonprivate school is declared absolutely not a state agent, and nobody in Harrisburg "may regulate the educational program of a participating nonpublic school that accepts money from a scholarship recipient beyond what is necessary to administer the program." So if they want to teach flat earth or creationism or the inherent superiority of the Aryan race or that LGBTQ persons are evil deviants, they can still collect those tasty public taxpayer dollars.

The dollar amounts are tiered:

For a student in ½ day kindergarten: $2,500.

For a student in full-day kindergarten through grade 8: $5,000.

For a student in grades 9-12: $10,000.

For a student with special needs (regardless of grade): $15,000.

Pennsylvania is, of course, facing a court-ordered requirement to fix their unconstitutionally inequitable school funding system. Diverting more taxpayer dollars to private schools, including schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate, hardly seems like a great way to go about fixing the problems. 

But lobbyists are working Harrisburg hard to push this private school taxpayer subsidy plan, trying very hard to sell the idea that "fully fund your public schools" somehow means "send more funding to private schools." If you are in Pennsylvania, phone or email your local lawmaker or the governor himself, who unfortunately appears to be a fan. Maybe point out that it was indeed great that the state was able to pull together the resources to fix I-95 so quickly, and that the solution to that problem was not to give every driver a voucher to go set up a private road of their own.