Examining education policy exposes differences in Republican and Democratic priorities in Pennsylvania, the only legislature in the Country that is split, with a Republican lead Senate and a Democratic lead House. The Democratic lead House of Representatives passed 399 bills in the 2023-2024 session, of which, the Republican Senate passed only 92.
A comparison of the House and Senate Education committee meetings reveals an alarming difference in leadership priorities between the separate chambers; for example, House Democrats were consistently dedicated to addressing inequities in education funding, while Republicans focused their Education policy efforts in other areas. Senate Republicans prevented a vote on legislation that would reform cyber charter school funding and address inequities in the funding formula, ignoring the Commonwealth Court ruling in 2023 that Pennsylvania's current funding formula is unconstitutional. Instead, Senate leadership focused their education policy efforts on censoring school resource materials and funding additional private school vouchers.
In October, Senator Brown’s E-Newsletter included an update on Education, celebrating the Senate’s approval of SB 7, which Brown wrote, “requires parents to ‘opt in’ and offer permission to have their children have access to sexually explicit materials,” implying that children who are not being censored by their parents are at risk of being exposed to “sexually explicit materials” in school libraries. Brown’s statements reinforce an untruth that these materials are in our schools in the first place, which unfairly places targets on the backs of library workers in our public education system. Our schools do not have explicit materials, however, this bill could affect other educational resources, as similar legislation in other states has forced educators to remove learning materials focused on the Holocaust and Art History, for example. It can also be argued that SB 7 is government overreach and would only add another level of bureaucracy. Teams of professionals are already tasked with reviewing school resource materials, which makes SB 7 redundant and an unnecessary burden on tax-payers.
It appears what matters most to the Republicans is not the content of the bills and their potential impact on their constituents, like one would hope, but rather, who wrote it and how it would affect their donors' interests. For example, Republican mega donor, Jeffrey Yass, gave millions of dollars to candidates in key areas of the state by way of PAC donations, and those who made it to the House and Senate have since been pushing for additional funding for private school vouchers and showed no interest in moving HB 2370 through the Senate.