Last week The Keystone Research Center issued an important and damning report focused on Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) private school voucher programs.
Click HERE to read Pennsylvania’sTrack Record on Private School Vouchers: Still no Accountability.
More than $2.6 billion tax dollars have been spent on the EITC/OSTC private school voucher programs since 2001 with virtually no financial or academic accountability.
Key findings from the report include:
- All students in the state do not benefit equally from Pennsylvania’s private school voucher programs—students in rural communities often don’t have access and participating schools are allowed to, and do, discriminate against students.
- By design, neither the EITC nor OSTC program requires meaningful educational or financial accountability; scholarship organizations and schools have few reporting requirements, making it difficult to assess impact or program compliance.
- The EITC/OSTC programs are subsidizing religious schools that have few state-required standards regarding curriculum. Some of these schools receiving public money teach creationism as science and present the Bible as factually accurate history.
- PA’s existing voucher program subsidizes the state’s most elite and expensive private schools, as well as affluent families.
The inadequate accountability in Pennsylvania’s $470 million OSTC and EITC programs (for 2023-24) makes clear that the state should not divert more taxpayer dollars to these programs or create a new one.
State lawmakers and Governor Shapiro should prioritize fully and fairly funding our public schools, which serve all of Pennsylvania’s students.
We expect vouchers to be part of the budget conversation in Harrisburg between lawmakers and Governor Shapiro.
Under NO circumstances should lawmakers or Governor Shapiro approve additional funding for any kind of school voucher programs until there is accountability for the $470 million spent on private school vouchers through EITC/OSTC.
Thank you, as always, for your support of public education.
Best,
Susan Spicka, Executive Director, Education Voters of PA.
PS: Here is an excerpt of information from the report about the religious teaching that tax dollars support through PA’s EITC/OSTC programs.
“Biblical Worldview” Education: Creationism as Science and the Bible as Literal History
Religious private schools (K-12) in Pennsylvania have little accountability to the state. Licensing and accreditation by a state-approved agency are optional. The requirements for religious private schools are simply registering and documenting that the school will meet compulsory attendance requirements and teach the mandated number of hours in specific subject areas.
An unknown and likely large number of religious schools use Biblical Worldview Education Textbooks that
- Include factually incorrect content,
- Present religious and political biases as fact, and
- Describe other religious and other Christian beliefs as false and the source of societal ills.
- Environmentalism is presented as a religion in conflict with Christianity. Climate change is dismissed as either not scientific or not necessarily caused by human activity. There are references to positive effects of climate change such as opening up the Arctic for oil exploration.
- Capitalism is promoted as biblically mandated. Recessions and economic problems are
portrayed as the result of government interference, labor unions, taxes, and regulating agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). - The hardships of slavery are downplayed. Slavery and the treatment of Native Americans were supposedly mitigated by their conversion to Christianity.
Here is a photo from a textbook used by schools supported by PA tax dollars 👀👀👀
