PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The two major candidates running for Pennsylvania governor are as far apart as they can be on the issue of public education, but they share a sliver of common ground when it comes to school choice.
The candidates for governor have widely different views on how Pennsylvania should educate its 1.7 million schoolchildren.
Republican Doug Mastriano has proposed eliminating property taxes that pay for schools, without detailing how that money would be replaced. In a March interview on WRTA Radio in Altoona, he also said he would divert about half of Pennsylvania’s average $19,000-per-student spending directly to parents to put toward private or parochial school tuition if they choose.
“If you want school choice, I’m your only choice,” Mastriano said at a September event in Philadelphia.
Democrat Josh Shapiro proposes increasing state K-12 education spending and routing more of it through the state’s “fair funding formula,” which takes poverty and local need into account.
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The nonprofit Children First doesn’t endorse candidates, but executive director Donna Cooper said education voters face a clear choice.
“I just think the contrast is so stark in terms of their position on the institution of public schools, that if you are interested in the institution of public schools continuing, you really have a pretty stark choice in this election,” Cooper told KYW Newsradio.
“The dividing line here is that Doug Mastriano has been very clear that he wants to turn the entire public education system into a voucher system.”
Shapiro’s position is far from that. He supports the plaintiffs in a Commonwealth Court suit that claims the state education funding is inadequate and inequitable.
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But in recent weeks, he’s expressed support for legislation establishing so-called “lifeline” scholarships for students at schools at the bottom 15% of performance.
House Bill 2169, passed by the Senate Education Committee in June, would take roughly a third of the state per-pupil funding from those schools and direct it to parents to choose other schools if they wished.
David Hardy, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, was encouraged that Shapiro was embracing some measure of school choice.
“It’s an embrace in the middle of a political campaign, for as much as you can take that as a real embrace,” Hardy told KYW Newsradio. “This is about giving people who are at the worst schools in Pennsylvania an opportunity. So he’s got to be for that.”
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Can you have it both ways – fully funding public education while supporting programs that would divert funding from struggling schools?
Shapiro was unavailable for a radio interview, but his campaign pointed us to comments he made Tuesday before the PennLive editorial board.
“It starts by making sure every single one of them, regardless of their socioeconomic status, regardless of the zip code they're from, regardless of their skin color, get an opportunity to succeed,” Shapiro said.
“So I'm going to try and sort of break up the old, you know, whatever mentality in Harrisburg, and get all those different sides to come together and realize that we can have choice in our school system and we can have well-funded schools and we can do both those things together and give our kids a chance to succeed.”
”This is not an either/or. I think this is a both/and.” Shapiro said.
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The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which has endorsed Shapiro, said Mastriano’s school funding plan would cost school districts nearly $13 billion, leading to job cuts and more crowded classrooms. At a Philadelphia campaign event last month, Mastriano took issue with that characterization.
“I will obviously fully fund education. Don’t believe what the unions say in their lies,” Mastriano said.
Mastriano did not respond to our request for an interview.
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Shapiro said he supports adding two parents to the state’s 21-member Board of Education, which sets curriculum standards. Mastriano has said he would ban the teaching of critical race and gender theory studies, and he would prevent students he called “biological males” from competing in girls’ sports.
Cooper says it’s unfortunate that culture wars have played such a dominant role in this campaign.
“The fights about abortion and critical race theory have taken a premier position in this race,” said Cooper, “when in fact what our kids need is for candidates to tell us how they're going to make our schools better.”