Yesterday, Betsy DeVos visited a Catholic school in Harrisburg to promote her proposed federal school voucher program that would funnel $5 billion in taxpayer money into private and religious schools.

PA House Speaker Mike Turzai, DeVos’s ideological soul mate, joined her.

On his way into the Catholic school (one that explicitly discriminates against transgender students and staff), Turzai told a retired teacher, “You don’t care about the kids,” and said that he was offended by her sign. It said, “I love public schools.” Turzai then proceeded to promote charter schools and school vouchers.

In addition to supporting charter and cyber charter schools, Mike Turzai has proposed a new school voucher program for Pennsylvania. He and other school privatizers in the legislature are also relentlessly promoting the expansion of Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) school voucher programs, which already divert $180 million in taxpayer money into private and religious schools each year.

A must-read article from WHYY, “’Trapped’ on the Main Line: Expensive private schools benefit from Pa. tax credits but report zero low-income students,” uncovers what many lawmakers don’t want the public to know: the EITC/OSTC programs provide generous private school tuition subsidies to wealthy families.

The WHYY article states:

An analysis of 151 schools that administer their own tax credit scholarship programs showed 57 schools reported enrolling no low-income students at all. Another 15 schools reported fewer than five percent low-income enrollment.

Some specific examples of where ETIC dollars flow:

YSC Academy, a school for elite soccer prospects run by the Philadelphia Union, raised $339,046 for a student body of 75. It reported serving no low-income students and declined to comment.

Academy of Notre Dame de Namur, an all-girls school on Philadelphia’s Main Line, raised $273,475 through the tax-break programs and reported that less than one percent of its student body was low-income.

The Kiski School, a boarding school in Westmoreland County, raised $216,350, and did not report serving any low-income students. Officials did not respond to requests for an interview.

This legislative session, Betsy DeVos-supporting school privatizers in the legislature will be fighting for even more dollars to subsidize the private education of wealthy families. They will side with the charter school industry and fight against even the most commonsense cyber charter school reforms to rein in the wasteful spending of millions of dollars on advertising, excessive executive compensation and more. They will also oppose any legislation that seeks to hold charter schools more accountable to taxpayers and students.

Our job is simple. We need to send crystal clear message to our own state lawmakers that we value and support our local public schools. We need to tell them to stand up to industry lobbyists and legislative leaders whose priority is to siphon our school tax dollars into private pockets.

Working together, we can and will win good things for Pennsylvania’s public school students and taxpayers this year. Thank you for your continued support of public education.

PS: We headed to the Capitol to release our cyber charter school funding report during the charter school industry’s rally on Monday where they brought in hundreds of people and spent a fortune on publicity for the event. This is my favorite story from the day.