PA Leaders Show They’re Not Serious About Fixing Education

When a complicated engineering system begins to break down, administrators will sometimes stand aside and let it fail, rather than fix it. The thinking is that, rather than wasting time and money working through various schemes that may not correct the problem, it can sometimes make more sense to wait and simply assess the cause of the eventual failure. Such decisions are typically made only in the most extreme cases, however.

Two developments in recent months suggest that education in Pennsylvania has reached such a point – where even elected officials are willing to let the schools collapse under their own weight rather than subjecting 1.7 million K-12 students to the misguided policies that broke them in the first place.

First: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro last week surprised almost no one by reneging on one of his signature campaign promises – to use vouchers to give students a way out of the state’s most horrendous public schools.

Rather than forcing taxpayers to continue subsidizing failure, vouchers would expose the ossified education system to market forces and require schools to compete for the right to educate students by demonstrating that they can deliver real results in the classroom.

It would be the kind of bold innovation that could make the Keystone State a national leader in education outcomes – but when push came to shove, Shapiro bowed to the demands of the state’s teachers’ unions and the politicians they control with their members’ dues dollars.

Citing the need to pass a state budget already larded with giveaways to the Left, Shapiro capitulated to Democratic House Majority Leader Matthew Bradford, promising to kill the voucher provision with his line-item veto even if it were passed by the legislature.

A cynic, of course, might suggest that Shapiro never intended to honor the promise in the first place, and that Bradford – whose party holds a whisker-thin, one-vote majority in the House – simply provided political cover by pretending to pressure the governor.

Second, this past spring, the Pennsylvania State Senate formed a special commission to “bring together stakeholders from education, business, labor, and government to create a shared long-term vision to redesign Pennsylvania’s education system.”

Dubbed the Pennsylvania Commission on Education & Economic Competitiveness (CEEC), the panel declares that its objective is to “(c)reate a shared, bipartisan vision for 21st century education that will prepare all students to compete in a globalized economy.”

In fact, the commission was established to deceive state voters into believing that schools would be getting a badly needed overhaul when what they can really expect is more of the same.

Or worse.

Why else would the commission’s participants reflect every conceivable constituency except the one it’s supposed to be serving – business?

Of the 34 organizations represented in CEEC’s subcommittee roster, only two – the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association and the National Federation of Independent Business-Pennsylvania – have even a symbolic connection to private-sector enterprise.

Not one corporation saw fit to lend its name to a study group charged with better preparing students to be productively employed in the private sector.

Meanwhile, at least 14 of the members represent labor organizations, and nearly all the rest come from the education establishment.

Either those who put the commission together really don’t understand that it’s the private sector that drives the economy, or they’re simply paying lip service to education in order to preserve their own power base.

Or both.

Are we to assume that groups like the Pennsylvania Education Association, the Pennsylvania School Administrators Association, or the Pennsylvania School Boards Association approach this assignment with the heartfelt belief that the state’s schools are failing and need to be reinvented? Or that lawmakers would accept their suggestions uncritically even if they did?

The CEEC is just an exercise in political theater. It is about as committed to improving education as Gov.Shapiro revealed himself to be with his voucher veto.

And for the same reasons.

No one would deny that the system is enormously complicated or suggest that improvements will be cheap or easy. But only someone with a personal stake in maintaining the status quo – read, unions – could deny with a straight face that Pennsylvania schools are failing in their basic mission of preparing youngsters to become functioning, well-adjusted, wage-earning adults. Yet that’s who the state’s elected leaders have empowered to spearhead the overhaul.

The question is no longer whether Pennsylvania’s schools can be fixed. It’s whether they’ve already failed beyond the point where repair is even possible.