Doug Mastriano Wants To Defund Public Education In Pennsylvania

Doug Mastriano, the GOP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, follows the MAGA playbook of not engaging with traditional media under any rules but his own. But he has left enough of a trail to indicate that his plan for public education in the Keystone State would be one of the most radical in the country.

Mastriano has argued that Pennsylvania’s property tax should be cut to zero. His current campaign website promises a “Property Tax Elimination Task Force” (since this piece was published, that promise has disappeared from the Mastriano website). He has never suggested replacing that lost revenue with any other source; in fact, his website also promises to cut gas tax and corporate net income tax.

Pennsylvania, like most states, uses real estate tax money to fund public education. Mastriano argues that his cuts can be paid for by “redirecting our state funds to follow students instead of systems” i.e. a school voucher program.

Mastriano envisions those vouchers as far less expensive than current spending. In a March interview, citing a figure of roughly $19,000 spent per student in Pennsylvania schools, Mastriano suggested cutting that to nine or ten thousand per student—roughly half. Since then Mastriano has walked back that figure; in a campaign video, he suggests that the vouchers would be an average of $15,000, to be spent on “public school, home school, private school, religious school.”

One state teachers union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, has released an impact study of Mastriano’s proposal. They find that his proposal would cut $12.75 billion in school funding—roughly one third of what’s spent in the state. Says PSEA President Rich Askey, “When you reduce funding for schools by that much “the first things that’s going to happen is that teachers are going to be laid off, programs are going to be l0st and class sizes are going to go through the roof.”

There are several problems with Mastriano’s plan.

Since the state only provides about 38% of the funding for local public schools (the national average is 47%), local real estate taxes make up the difference. That means ending real estate taxes will cut school funding by far more than the 50% that Mastriano originally talked about; the money to fund his voucher program would have to come from somewhere else on the state level. (In discussing school funding in Pennsylvania, every figure is an average, so results will vary by district.)

Mastriano’s program would mean brutal defunding of rural districts, yet there are few private schools operating in those communities (and those have limited capacity). Those families would see funding for their local schools gutted, and in return they would get nothing. And as always with voucher systems, private schools get to choose their students, and not the other way around.

Such a system would also result in a loss of local control. Communities can now choose to raise their own taxes to strengthen local schools or promote capital improvements; without the ability to levy real estate taxes, local school boards would lose that power.

Districts facing extreme financial stress might decide to simply close schools; just six years ago, Erie considered closing all high schools and leaving families to find their own solution.

Mastriano’s concerns match the usual culture warrior checklist. He repeatedly rails against critical race theory in the schools, though he fails to mention any actual examples of crt being taught in the state. Other campaign materials promise to ban mandatory masking, ban “biological males” from female sports, and expand school choice.

He promises incentives and rewards for exceptional teachers and to establish a “Heroes to Teachers Program,” which suggests a program like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s program for placing veterans and their wives, regardless of education or training, in classrooms (DeSantis attended a campaign stop for Mastriano in Pittsburgh).

It is possible that within the next weeks, Mastriano will offer further details on how his plan to defund public education might work. But Pennsylvania is the state where Tom Corbett became a rare one-term government in large part because of charges he cut $1 billion from education funding. Mastriano will have to make a convincing case that cutting several billion won’t carry a similar political cost.