Pennsylvania’s New Education Heist Has a Donor

Jeff Yass is robbing Pennsylvania’s public schools to pay for private tuition and calling the theft a scholarship. The good news this week, if any, is that one Democratic governor is declining to scale the theft further. Hundreds of Philadelphia children will receive a payment marketed as a lifeline; the legislature that produced the conditions making the lifeline appear necessary is the same legislature the apparatus’s donors have spent decades capitalizing. The lifeline is the cover story. The theft is the news.

The payment announced Wednesday is funded by Jeff Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, and his wife Janine. Jeff Yass is among the largest individual political donors in American politics. The family has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on candidates and ballot operations whose unifying commitment is the redirection of public-school funding into private-school vouchers and tax-credit subsidies. Five hundred Philadelphia children will receive eight thousand dollars a year through high school graduation; the city is closing seventeen district schools in 2027, a closure schedule driven by enrollment decline that is itself the product of a state-level funding decision rather than a natural law. The scholarships are first-come, first-served — a rationing rule whose function is to let the donor pick which children get the philanthropic ride and which get the closing school. This is the donor selecting beneficiaries with public money the donor arranged not to pay. That is donor capture.

The scholarships are usable at sixteen private schools the prize organization has certified, most of them religious. Liguori Academy offers building-trades training; St. Francis de Sales is a Catholic elementary school. The certification is the donor’s certification. Public regulators do not vouch for the schools; the donor does. The phrase “innovative and promising,” in this vocabulary, means the school’s operator and the donor’s organization agree on what an acceptable school looks like — a discretion the public school district does not have over its own buildings, and a discretion the public has not delegated to the donor on the public’s behalf. A donor who handed someone else’s money to recipients of the donor’s own choosing, in any other transaction in American life, would be charged with embezzlement. Here it is called philanthropy. The accurate word is graft.

A new school may indeed change a child’s life. The relevant question is why the public schools the children are leaving are in the shape they are in. Only a third of Philadelphia students are proficient in English on state tests and only a quarter in math — the predictable result of a per-pupil funding rate that has run well below what the state’s own funding formula calls for and that the Commonwealth Court found, in 2023, unconstitutionally inadequate. The thirty-two thousand-dollar per-pupil spending figure that appears in the donor-aligned vocabulary as evidence of waste includes special-education obligations and capital-debt service the state requires districts to carry; comparison to private-school tuition, which carries neither, does the work the comparison is engineered to do. District staffing rose because enrollment fell unevenly across grade and school; the funding formula did not follow the children, and the consolidations a coherent funding regime would have produced did not happen because the political coalition that benefits from district destabilization preferred destabilization to consolidation. This is what robbing the kids looks like in the per-pupil-spending line item. The state starves the schools; the donor’s research wing then cites the failure stats; the donor offers the scholarship as the replacement. The starvation is the business plan. The scholarship is the brand activation.

Parents have few other options because the state’s two existing tax-credit scholarship programs are themselves the donor class’s preferred mechanism for converting state tax obligation into private-school subsidies. More than a hundred thousand mostly lower-income children used the programs in 2023-24; the funding caps the donor class objects to are the legislative residue of the only remaining check the public has on the mechanism’s scale. The reports supplying the legitimating numbers come from the Commonwealth Foundation — a Pennsylvania State Policy Network affiliate whose funding flows substantially from the same donor networks that finance the school-privatization political infrastructure, including the Yass family’s giving. The reports document the demand and decline to document the donor class’s role in producing the demand. The numbers are real. The institutional positioning that selects which numbers are produced and how they are framed is not in the reports. This is misleading propaganda. The donor pays for the research that produces the demand statistics that justify the policy that pays the donor. Naming the production chain is naming the propaganda.

The average tax-credit scholarship in 2023 was under three thousand dollars. The legislative push the donor class wants from Gov. Shapiro is to create new vouchers worth much more — direct tuition subsidies funded by redirected public revenue. Lawmakers have increased program funding; the governor’s 2026-27 budget request asks for more of the increased program funding to be allocated to public-school supplemental activities rather than further expansion of the tax-credit subsidy. That request is the position a coherent funding regime would take: the children remaining in the public schools, who are the majority of Pennsylvania’s children, receive the supplemental activities the funding decision says they are owed. Calling that request anti-choice, as the donor-aligned vocabulary does, requires pretending the choice on offer is not “donor selects, public pays.” That is what the choice is. The accurate word for the request to expand it is shakedown.

The tax-credit-for-donations mechanism deserves the plain description the donor-aligned vocabulary refuses it. A taxpayer with a Pennsylvania tax obligation directs the money that would otherwise have gone to the state’s general fund — funding public schools, public universities, public transit, public health, the courts — into a scholarship organization the donor selects. The donor receives a tax credit covering most or all of the redirected amount. The state’s general fund receives less. The scholarship organization receives more. The donor is praised for generosity at no net cost to the donor. The structure is a wealth-transfer mechanism dressed as philanthropy. It is theft. The donor takes the public’s tax revenue, hands it to the schools the donor picked, and pockets a credit covering most of what the donor said the donor gave. The kids whose public schools are being starved are being robbed to pay for it. The donor is praised at the same dinner. This is graft. It is graft because it is the donor’s investments in the political coalition that produced the policy that produced the tax credit that the donor’s “donation” then collects. It is graft because it is the donor selecting where the kids’ money goes. It is graft because everyone in the donor’s class understands the math and nobody at the dinner says the word.

The same advocacy-research-as-policy-authority discipline surfaces wherever an editorial page is operating in service of a coalition’s policy preferences — the technique is technique-shaped, not coalition-shaped. A greater-good-paramount-aligned outlet citing a Network for Public Education or American Federation of Teachers-funded study on charter-school harm without surfacing the study’s institutional alignment performs the same operation in mirror image; the institutional positioning of the cited research is the load-bearing question in both directions, and the symmetric reading would name the funding source in both directions. This board operates the discipline in both directions and will continue to do so when greater-good-paramount artifacts of the same form cross the desk. Donor-funded research presented without its funding source is propaganda whichever coalition’s donor wrote the check.

The federal tax-credit program now on offer scales the mechanism. The program permits donors to redirect their federal tax obligation to scholarship organizations of their choice; the federal general fund receives less, the chosen private schools receive more, the donor is praised at no net cost. New York’s governor has indicated she intends to opt the state into the federal program. Pennsylvania’s governor is, at this writing, declining. The question framed for Mr. Shapiro by the donor-aligned vocabulary is whether he wants Pennsylvanian donor money to leave the state. The actual question — which is the question the public deserves an answer to — is whether Pennsylvania’s tax base belongs to Pennsylvania’s public, or to the donors who have negotiated, school by school, the right to redirect it. A governor opting in is a governor cashing the check. A governor opting out is a governor declining to be the next signature on the heist.

Scaling the federal program in Pennsylvania would be the largest legal theft of public revenue in the state’s history. Declining to scale it is the smallest act of decency Pennsylvania’s children are owed from a governor who could otherwise be cashing the donor-class checks his peers are cashing. The donor will keep offering. The donor’s research wing will keep producing demand statistics. The donor’s editorial allies will keep calling the offer hope. The word for what the offer actually is, when the money is followed from the taxpayer’s obligation to the donor’s selected school to the donor’s tax credit, is theft. The word for the political infrastructure that produced the policy, that funds the research that justifies the policy, that praises the donor for “giving” the redirected obligation, is donor capture. Pennsylvania’s children are owed the public schools the state’s funding formula says they are owed. The heist is the alternative. Naming it is the first act of refusing it.

— The Main Street Independent Editorial Board