How Pennsylvania Shatters National Narratives Around School Choice

Why I think PA is secretly the choice-hungriest state

Pennsylvania doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as states like Florida or Arizona in school choice conversations. On paper, those states have more impressive programs through universal eligibility and larger scholarship amounts.

But a new report from the Commonwealth Foundation illustrates how Pennsylvania still manages to foster an incredibly choice-friendly climate.

In fact, despite all of Pennsylvania’s limitations relative to more universal programs, some data suggests that Pennsylvania might quietly rival or even outpace many of the states more commonly celebrated as school choice leaders in one vital area—demand.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit, or EITC. Launched in 2001 at $20 million annually, the program has grown into a $630 million endeavor. Together with the companion Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC), the state awarded more than 101,000 K–12 scholarships in the 2023–24 school year, the most recent year for which state data is available. In that school year, Pennsylvania’s school choice participation outpaced every state in the country beside Florida, which was in its second year of universal eligibility. Even if the programs haven’t grown at all since then, they’d still be in same league as Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

On paper, Pennsylvania has no business being that successful.

First, Pennsylvania’s focus on socioeconomic targets means there is no “low-hanging fruit” for participation counts. Families must earn below a household income threshold of $116,055 (plus roughly $20,000 per dependent) to qualify for EITC. OSTC recipients must also live within the attendance boundary of a low-achieving public school.

Average household income for EITC recipients across the state runs between $56,000 and $78,000 annually, well below Pennsylvania’s median family income of just over $100,000. Data from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia — which distributes more EITC scholarships than any other single organization in the state — shows that in Philadelphia County itself, where 2,712 K–8 students received scholarships in 2024–25, the average annual income of scholarship families was $62,987, roughly in line with the county median of $60,302. The program is, in other words, reaching the people it’s designed to reach.

Second, the average scholarship award in 2023–24 was $2,776, just 16% of public per-student spending and a fraction of the funding offered by other large school choice programs. Because selecting a school is a discrete choice, a scholarship needs to be large enough to make a private school adequately affordable. Three thousand dollars is far from nothing, but I would generally assume it isn’t enough to pull low- and mid-income families into private education.

But private schools, the state, and families are meeting in the middle. Data compiled by the report from Simple Tuition Solutions, which processes financial aid assessments for private schools statewide, shows a median private school tuition of $5,448 annually, with a median family tuition contribution of $3,874 after scholarship funds. Eighty-three percent of the schools in that dataset charge less than $10,000 per year.

The most striking finding in the report, though, isn’t about who is getting scholarships. It’s about who isn’t.

In 2023–24, Pennsylvania scholarship organizations received 170,568 K–12 scholarship applications and were only able to fulfill 101,751 of them. That means roughly 69,000 students applied for a scholarship and were turned away—not because they didn’t qualify, not because there wasn’t a school willing to take them, but simply because the program ran out of money. The caps on tax credit donations, set each year by the state legislature, put a hard ceiling on how many scholarships can be funded. The demand has exceeded supply every single year since the programs launched.

Unlike the big-name school choice programs, which are more or less guaranteed full funding through states’ funding formulas, Pennsylvania’s programs are funded through tax-incentivized philanthropy. Donors don’t even get a tax credit worth their entire donation, like they do in some other states’ tax-credit scholarship programs. It’s a credit to donors, schools, and families that they are able to make such a clearly suboptimal program work at the scale that it does.

The report’s authors at the Commonwealth Foundation recommend several remedies to improve the programs’ effectiveness.

One is simply raising the donation caps. Another is adopting an automatic index similar to one used in Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program (not to be confused with its ESA), which would allow the programs to grow proportionally with demonstrated demand rather than requiring annual legislative action. A third is the Learning Investment Tax Credit, proposed legislation that would provide families with a refundable tax credit of up to $8,000 per child for private school expenses. That last option provides the most predictability and flexibility for families. Refundable tax credits like this have been launched in Oklahoma and Idaho.

The most immediate opportunity, though, may be the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit. Governor Josh Shapiro has until January 1, 2027 to opt Pennsylvania into the federal program’s inaugural year. One outside analysis estimates that if 15 percent of Pennsylvania taxpayers with a qualifying federal tax liability participated, it would generate $484 million in scholarship donations, more than the entire current EITC and OSTC combined.

That additional funding would shred the wait list of Pennsylvania families currently left hoping for school choice scholarships. Even if we assume interest has not grown since 2024, if all families on the wait list from that school year were granted scholarships, Pennsylvania would have the second-largest choice student population in the country, surpassed only by Florida, which has double its K-12 population.

Pennsylvania built something real over 25 years. One million scholarship awards,101,000 students served in a single year, a network of over 200 scholarship organizations spanning all 67 counties. The data shows those scholarships are going to working-class families, to racially diverse students, and increasingly to children in rural communities whose schools—as the report’s case studies illustrate—are holding together entire communities.

The people of Pennsylvania have created a choice-rich ecosystem with one hand tied behind their back. I’d love for policymakers to let us see what they can create with both.

This was originally published to our Substack.