Republicans tend to support school choice and Democrats tend to oppose it. That’s why there’s been a rush of red states to approve scholarships for K-12 students. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has been a state with mixed partisan control and has a number of school choice programs. I speak about it with Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation, for the Overton Window podcast.

“Pennsylvania has one of the oldest tax credit scholarship programs in the nation,” Stelle says. “The amount of tax credits available every year changes based on what the legislature passes. We’ve seen a steady growth in the caps on our tax credit scholarship program. We’ve been able to quadruple the number of tax credits available over the past ten years.

“Every year for the past four years we’ve seen an increase in our tax credit scholarship program because it’s just become accepted that this program grows every single year,” Stelle says.

“The contrast between Illinois and Pennsylvania is interesting. Illinois had a very small tax credit program and they killed it,” Stelle says. There wasn’t enough support from Democrats in the state.

“We serve more kids through our tax credit scholarship than states like Georgia and Oklahoma that have a variety of programs. That’s partially because we’re a bigger state, but mostly because we’ve had this program grow year after year,” Stelle says.

Democrats in the state feel pressure to increase the scholarships. “About four years ago, Gov. Tom Wolf ran for office campaigning that he was going to end the scholarship tax credit, that he was going to eliminate the program. In fact, it grew more under his administration than any administration yet,” Stelle says.

“It just shows you its popularity. When we poll the program’s popularity, it’s usually in the 70s, regardless of party, regardless of urban/rural, across the board.”

Stelle advises taking small bites at the apple as the way to boost school choice. “It’s worth fighting for incremental gains year after year, because those things are a lot easier to do. And in five or six years, you’re in a much stronger position to expand the Overton Window even further on education choice,” she says.

Democratic lawmakers are stuck between the teachers union, a conventional supporter of Democratic candidates, and the parents who benefit from school choice. Stelle says that legislation to cut one of the state’s school choice programs this year got a large response from the union.

“But we saw an even stronger response from the schools and the families that were under attack by this bill,” Stelle says.

“It’s much easier to get people motivated when something they have is going away compared to asking them to advocate for something new that they don’t have yet,” Stelle says.

Yet they are also getting people out to call for an expanded scholarship program, lifeline scholarships. Part of their advocacy is to find people who benefit from school choice, like Ana Criton, a parent who lives in the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia.

“If you pay attention to all the news on crime and drugs, you may have heard of Kensington,” Stelle says. “It’s basically a war zone.

“So she found the Gloria Academy. It’s a secular school, safe, and the expectations for academic achievement are high. Her son’s been able to excel to the point where he’s getting ready to go to college now,” Stelle says.

Or a mother in Harrisburg who works extra jobs to be able to afford tuition at a hybrid academy. “She took the governor at his word that he was going to sign the Lifeline bill. He said he supported it two years ago. And when he backed down, she was very angry.

“The number one reason parents tell us they need these programs isn’t so much worries over what their children are going to be when they grow up,” Stelle says. “It’s basic things like safety. An escape from bullying. We told a story of a family whose son was constantly bullied because he was biracial. He got a scholarship to go to a Catholic school to get away from that situation.”

Finding people who can speak out about their experience is one way that they can get support from Democratic lawmakers who block school choice. “What they say behind closed doors is different from what they say in public,” Stelle says. “I think there are folks who are sincerely concerned about the lack of options for their constituents, but they can’t be for school choice because of the political pressures.”

There is an important intellectual debate around school choice. Its opponents aren’t just the people who benefit from the status quo. There are people who think it’s a bad idea. In addition to going through the arguments about why school choice can improve public education, people also want to hear stories of those affected. Getting people to speak out about the problems they have with the current system and the benefits of a change is a way to put a face on the policy.

For Stelle, persistence pays off. “Because we’ve been consistently pushing this issue for over a decade — or for tax credit scholarships, three decades soon — you will get these incremental victories. You will expand your constituency. And that’s only going to make you more influential, more difficult to ignore,” she says.

“I’m really proud of the work that we’ve been able to do. We’re serving more than 50,000 kids every single year through this program,” Stelle says.

Check out our conversation at the Overton Window podcast.

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