Another state lawmaker is making a run at expanding school choice opportunities in Pennsylvania.
Rep. Andrew Lewis, R-Dauphin County, has introduced multi-faceted legislation that would establish state-funded education savings accounts called Keystone Hope Scholarships that could be used to cover the cost of homeschooling or private school tuition.
His Excellent Education for All Act legislation also calls for increasing funding for the state’s tax credit program for businesses that fund scholarships.
Additionally, it proposes changes to the state’s charter school law and protecting learning pods – small learning groups of students parents created during the COVID-19 pandemic to help students with virtually delivered school work – from state regulations and monitoring.
“The time has finally come to break down the barriers to an excellent education and focus in Pennsylvania on funding students, not on unaccountable systems,” Lewis said at a Thursday Capitol news conference.
This bill “will be a game changer for families across our state and will ensure for the first time in our history that every child regardless of their zip code or unique personal learning needs will be guaranteed access to an excellent education.”
He was joined at the news conference by nearly a dozen other House Republican colleagues who are co-sponsoring the bill. It is similar to a measure, sponsored by Sen. Scott Martin, R-Lancaster County, that narrowly passed the Senate Education Committee in June by a 6-5 vote.
Lewis’ bill, as did Martin’s bill, drew immediate opposition from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, which sees it having a deleterious effect on school districts.
“This bill would divert huge amounts of taxpayer dollars from Pennsylvania’s public schools every year to spend on private school tuition, tax breaks for businesses, and a massive expansion of unaccountable charter schools,” said the teachers union spokesman Chris Lilienthal.
“As Pennsylvania’s educators struggle to close learning gaps with students and address mental health needs amidst a global pandemic, this is the worst possible time to take such a large amount of state funds from public schools, where nine in 10 Pennsylvania students are educated.”
Lewis maintains the financial harm from the scholarship program to most school districts would be modest since districts would retain all the local revenue they generate from property taxes. But the roughly $6,000 per-pupil amount the state pays to a district would be deposited into a student’s scholarship account rather than going to the school district.
For the past two decades, school choice proponents have tried and failed to change the state’s 1997 charter school law to increase the number of these independent public schools. Past efforts to advance scholarship programs like the one Lewis is proposing also fell short of winning passage.
The most success that school choice advocates have had in Pennsylvania has been increasing the amount of money for education-related tax credit programs.
This year, the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program saw its biggest expansion with a $40 million increase, boosting its funding to $225 million.
Lewis said the strategy behind his decision to lump the various school choice programs into one bill is to “paint the ideal picture for education in Pennsylvania and run it forward to try to get it done.”
Rep. Dawn Keefer, R-York County, said the proposal puts power in the hands of parents to make the best educational decisions for their children.
She said the experiences of other states that have private school choice programs show they can increase parental satisfaction and involvement, provide better educational opportunities for lower-income children and incentivize school districts to better meet the needs of students.
“The bottom-up approach of a market-based education system means that parents are education providers,” she said.
Corey DeAngelis, national research director for the American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy organization, also was on hand for the news conference to throw his support behind the proposal.
“Education funding is supposed to be about educating children not for propping up a particular institution,” he said. “That’s why we should fund students directly as opposed to funding systems.”
DeAngelis pointed out the same people who support funding individuals directly through other taxpayer-funded programs such as Pell Grants for college students and Head Start for preschoolers “get all up in arms and oppose funding students directly only when it comes to those in-between years of K-12 education.”
He said the only logical explanation for that inconsistency are entrenched special interests such as the teachers union that profits from receiving education dollars.
Lewis said he is optimistic that the proposal will draw enough public support to convince his colleagues and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who is a staunch supporter of traditional public schools, to become law.
“Too often people look at the choice issue as a Republican issue and Democrats are going to oppose it but I really think this is an opportunity to come together,” Lewis said.
“Governor Wolf has called himself the education governor. I think he’ll look at the outcomes of certain kids that have been trapped in a failing school district and went to another school and succeeded. I think he’ll see this clear correlation.”
Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.