Data from the most recent national tracking poll for EdChoice (the nonprofit founded by Milton and Rose Friedman that’s dedicated to advancing education freedom and choice in the face of the competition-hating public-school monopoly) shows that Americans are strongly in favor of charter schools. The survey’s crosstab results (pages 107–08 for the curious) shows that 53 percent of all adults support them, with only 14 percent opposing, while favorability rises noticeably among school parents: 72 percent support charter schools, while only 11 percent oppose.
Those figures inch upward in Pennsylvania, a persistent hotspot for legislative and political battles on education reform these past few years, marked by the betrayal of alleged “moderate” Democrat Josh Shapiro, who first won election as governor in 2022 campaigning as an ed-reform supporter, but who since has caved to the powerful teachers’ union, which calls shots in the legislature’s Democrat caucus.
More data: Commonwealth residents and school parents think alike when it comes to charter schools: 74 percent support them. And a 2025 poll by the Commonwealth Foundation — Pennsylvania’s premier pro-liberty think tank and the leader in expanding school choice — shows that 79 percent of residents support expanding tax-credit scholarships for pre-K through grade 12, 72 percent support “education opportunity accounts,” and 71 percent support “a refundable tax credit that gives money to families to spend on the direct needs of their child, including private tuition, online education programs, tutoring, curriculum, and therapies.”
That dramatic, popular support for choice and reform holds no sway with the Democratic caucus in the Pennsylvania House, where Majority Leader Matt Bradford — who has taken more than $200,000 in teachers’ union political support while simultaneously working for a law firm whose clients include public school districts — rules. Efforts to block, and even roll back, reform efforts and scholarship funding are a priority, and system-protecting is doctrine. Pennsylvania’s education establishment is in an excellent position, with its interests represented not only by lobbyists and union leaders but by one of the most powerful legislators in the state.
With a June 30 state budget deadline sparking brinksmanship, the Commonwealth Foundation reports that this week the state’s Democrat-run House Education Committee “rushed passage” of a bill that would “immediately cut” $102 million from the state’s popular K–12 “Lifeline” scholarship programs. This would “take away scholarships from 30,000 current students.” The bill would also eliminate the scholarship program in 2027 (and replace it with a new “Education Options Tax Credit”), “require onerous new regulations on every private school, also require the Auditor General to do audits for private schools, but not public schools,” and “impose a 2% tax on scholarship organizations to fund government agencies.”
But wait, there’s more: Committee Democrats also rammed through another bill “to cut public charter schools by an estimated $500 million.”
Commonwealth Foundation president Andrew Lewis decried the votes, coming “as over 200,000 students finished another school year stuck in a failing school. Scholarship programs are often the only way for struggling, low-income students to access a school that best serves their needs.”
(The state’s popular Education Improvement Tax Credit and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit programs provided scholarships to over 100,000 K–12 students from low- to middle-income families, affording them access to high-quality schools of their choice. Demand far outpaces supply: Legislative caps placed on the programs resulted in nearly 70,000 applicants being shut out from scholarship funding.)
The Pennsylvania House Democrats war-waging against education reform is complemented by Governor Shapiro, whose proposed FY 2026–27 budget seeks to reduce funding available through education tax credits for scholarship organizations, while taking on another reform effort by recommending cuts to public cyber-schools.
It’s expected that the House committee actions — even if adopted by the full chamber — will be dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania Senate. But their true purpose is political theater: to go on offense, very publicly, in order to shape the outcome of state budget negotiations, even if that means defying the will of the people (the children!) they represent, and protecting the needs of the people (teachers’ union leaders!) they effectively represent.
In the swing state of Pennsylvania, the locus of popular support for education reform and of significant demand for more of it (and, sadly, of plentiful failing schools that manifest it), Democrats, even those who posture as moderates and reformers — yes you, especially you, Governor Shapiro — remain hell-bent.
America needs to know this about them. And about him.