From the Pennsylvania School Board Association (https://www.psba.org/):
The results of a new public opinion poll show most Pennsylvanians are opposed to giving parents taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools and prefer investing state funds to strengthen resources to help public schools.
The poll, conducted for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association by Terry Madonna Opinion Research, presents the findings of a survey of 667 Pennsylvania voters conducted April 5-23, 2018.
The poll shows that more than half (57.1%) of Pennsylvanians said they were opposed to giving public tax money to parents to pay tuition at a private or parochial school while only 31.8% supported the concept. In addition, survey respondents (48.7%) said providing schools additional funding and resources was a better way to help students in struggling schools while only 28.5% support giving those students vouchers to attend a different school.
Further, few see vouchers as a priority. Those respondents who said they are “strongly opposed” to vouchers outnumbered those “strongly supporting” vouchers by more than 2 to 1 (28.1% “strongly opposed” to only 12.9% “strongly supporting”). Voters’ opposition to voucher programs crosses party lines and extends across various demographic and regional groupings in the survey, including gender, age and race.
These results clearly indicate that Pennsylvanians do not support legislation such as Senate Bill 2 that takes money away from a school district’s state subsidy for Education Savings Account (ESA) vouchers to be used at private and religious schools and for other expenses.
“Vouchers divert attention from the current needs of students and responsibilities of policymakers to support those students. There are more effective ways to improve education. Ignoring our public schools in favor of throwing tax dollars to private schools weakens educational opportunities for all children and will only serve to chip away at Pennsylvania’s public education system. Instead, the state should focus on working on programs and initiatives to improve schools for our current and future students,” said PSBA Chief Executive Officer Nathan G. Mains.
“We should focus on improving public schools – where 90% of children go – not taking money away from them for the 10% who choose not to attend public schools,” Mains added.
PSBA is working with a broad coalition of education organizations all opposing ESA vouchers. For PSBA’s position and other resources related to Senate Bill 2, visit PSBA’s web page on the topic: https://www.psba.org/issue/esa-vouchers/.
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