By Guy Ciarrocchi
This school year about 108,000 Pennsylvania students from poor and working-class families received K-12 tuition-assistance scholarships to find a non-public school that works — funded entirely by charitable contributions. About 300 students at Little Flower High School alone. 80,000 more students wanted this tuition-assistance, but the funding ran out.
Stunningly, seeing this successful, popular program in our community deserving more support, every Northeast Philly Democrat House member responded … by voting to crush this life-changing student program.
Why? Sadly, because it’s extremely popular.
Philly Democrats learned just how popular. Thousands of parents, students and donors flooded legislators with calls, emails and personal visits.
It’s why they’re racing, trying to spin what they did to cripple it.
House Democrats are denying what they did in phone calls to school principals, donors, Archbishop Perez and pastors, Jewish Day school leaders and parents – and letters in newspapers.
Here’s just a sample of how they voted to hurt thousands of Northeast Philly students.
They imposed a tax on the money raised — taking away $15M in tuition assistance annually. The program has 2 tiers (one for all students, plus one for the poorest students): The bill prohibits poor students from getting that extra aid, effectively forcing them to leave their schools — hurting schools like Little Flower.
They dramatically reduced the eligibility income caps — kicking out the kids of Philly cops, nurses and building trades members: “too rich.” They reduced the benefits of donors, making some donors less able to give — so, less money.
They require the Auditor General to audit every nonprofit scholarship organization and every non-public school — every single year. That doesn’t happen to the School District of Philadelphia, where taxpayers spent $5 billion this year.
Suppose the issue wasn’t charitable donations for students, but fighting cancer. Imagine House Democrats did all of this to the Cancer Society — taxes on donations, denying help to middle-class families and requiring expensive, invasive audits every year, even for your doctor.
Then, imagine misleading constituents: They didn’t do anything to “harm” the cancer patients; their goal was to “strengthen” fighting cancer … Really?
Are the House Democrats clueless as to what they did; think parents, donors and principals don’t know how the plan works; or, are they so brazen that they think they can get away with lying to us?
Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit program is in its 25th year. Donors have assisted over 1 million Pennsylvania students — tens of thousands of Northeast Philly students have been helped, many schools saved.
In 2001 when the EITC became law, it was overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation — passing the House 135-64. Now, the teachers union wants to stop school choice for many families.
Families who are well-off have school choice: They can afford tuition for non-public, even private schools. Those families can move out of Philly for a “good district.” And, the kids of the politically connected “get in” good schools. What about the rest of us?
The success of Pennsylvania’s program is why the teachers union is so selfishly against it. And, they’ve used their outsized influence to pressure Democrats to hurt students and the schools who serve them.
Northeast Philly should expect our elected officials to fight for us — for our children – not the teachers union. ••
Guy Ciarrocchi is a Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation. He was baptized at St. Jerome and married at St. Adalbert. Follow him @PhilaFreedomGuy. (A version of this column initially was published at Broad + Liberty.)
