Jeff Yass: The Pennsylvania School Choice Stakes

(This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal)

By Jeff Yass

With many states enacting universal school choice, why does Pennsylvania’s proposed $100 million program—representing only 0.2% of the state budget—matter?

My state has been engulfed in controversy for months over Lifeline Scholarships. Funded with state tax dollars, the awards generally range between $5,000 and $10,000 per student. They are available to low-income families who send their children to the worst schools because they are trapped by their ZIP Codes.

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro endorsed such scholarships during his 2022 campaign, and he negotiated them into a budget deal with the Republican Senate. Notably, as Mr. Shapiro requested, the agreement made Lifeline Scholarship funding a new line in the state budget, so that it didn’t cut into existing public-education funding. Per pupil spending would go up because schools would still be paid for students who go elsewhere on Lifeline Scholarships. In a $45 billion state budget, the $100 million allotted for the Lifeline program is additional education funding—something Democrats historically favor.

The Senate lawmakers who negotiated the deal called it a bipartisan compromise with the governor. To secure support from House Democrats, they included hundreds of millions of dollars of new spending for Democrats’ preferred programs, including new aid to the same public-school districts that Lifeline Scholarship recipients want to leave.

Pennsylvania’s worst schools have been failing for decades. Normally a failing business loses both its customers and the revenue from those lost customers. Under the Pennsylvania compromise, these perpetually failing schools might lose their customers—students—to another school, but they get to keep the customers’ money and they would get more funding from the state.

At first, the teachers unions didn’t respond as expected. They didn’t hurriedly agree to take the additional money. Instead, they cried, “No deal!” And the House Democrats beholden to them have followed. Consequently, a large portion of Pennsylvania’s budget is incomplete well past the June 30 deadline.

What’s going on? When have Democrats ever declined more spending on schools? The teachers unions and Democrats are, unfortunately, acting rationally and in accordance with the economic laws that they typically ignore. They understand that Lifeline Scholarships will create competition for their sacred cow, the urban public-school monopoly. They further understand that monopolies can’t allow competition, because monopolies know that their product is inferior and that their customers will flee to a better product at the first chance. Competition kills monopolies. Teachers unions and Democrats fight competition at all costs, even declining additional educational spending, to preserve a governmental monopoly that disenfranchises low-income, predominately minority urban children. The harder they fight, the worse the schools they protect become.

Teachers unions need to kill Lifeline Scholarships in the crib, because they know that Lifeline Scholarships will work, allowing students to leave their schools. Students attending dangerous, failing public schools are generally low-income. Providing resources to these students will create a stampede out of deficient public schools as evidenced by the long waiting lists for charter-school seats and tax-credit scholarships.

Lifeline Scholarships are the canary in the coal mine, in Pennsylvania and nationally. If teachers unions allow a $100 million program today, parents desperate for a taste of freedom will rush to enroll their children in better schools and demand larger funding programs. If the unions allow even one of their financially supported Democrats to buck the antichild orthodoxy and do the right thing for their desperate constituents, other Democrats will surely follow, in Pennsylvania, in other states and in Congress.

That is why the teachers unions have squashed support for school choice formerly expressed by Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who previously supported educational choice vouchers, and Sen. Cory Booker, a former board member of the Alliance for School Choice. Their political bullying turns a lawmaker who could be a modern-day Frederick Douglass into a modern-day George Wallace.

Anyone in either party who aspires to national leadership must resist these teachers unions and do what’s right—fight for families’ right to self-determination, especially for poor children trapped in failing schools. In Pennsylvania, we will never give up on this battle.

Mr. Yass is managing director and a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group.