Well, it could have been worse.
For education in Pennsylvania, 2025 was a mixed bag, marked by one sort-of-victory, a promising trend, and a whole lot of awful things that could have happened, but didn’t.
The Victory
After years and years of fruitless complaints about the huge costs to local taxpayers, the legislature finally addressed Pennsylvania’s dysfunctional cyber charter spending.
Pennsylvania cyber charter funding has always been a mess, computed as if cyber charters were operating like regular brick and mortar schools. For one things, this results in wildly inconsistent tuition rates paid by local districts for the exact same service. Republican Auditor General Timothy DeFoor noted in his report at the start of the year:
Each of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts is required to calculate its own specific regular and special education tuition rates each year based on its prior year budgeted expenditures, resulting in 1,000 different rates paid to the same cyber charter school.
Because those rates are based on brick and mortar costs, Pennsylvania cyber charters are seriously overpaid. Report after report from Education Voters of Pennsylvania has shown made two points: that cyber charters are raking in far more money than they need to operate, and that these excess funds — taken directly from Pennsylvania taxpayers — are being spent on everything from real estate empires to recreation to millions in marketing expenses, and on maintaining fund balances in excess of what a public school district is allowed to hold onto. All done with far less accountability than a public school system faces.
Former Governor Tom Wolf attempted to reform the state’s cyber charter law, and was unsuccessful. The Democrat-controlled House passed a bill that would have improved the funding system, but the GOP-controlled Senate did not seem interested in picking it up. Meanwhile, pressure to do something continued to grow, with around 90% of elected school boards, including members from all across the political spectrum, passing resolutions calling for relief.
The cyber charter industry stuck to its long-running strategy — deflect and deny. When the House held a series of hearings on funding, the cyber charters declined to show up, but sent one of their trusty surrogates with the standard talking points: the state testing system is bad, the pension fund is the real financial villain, and the many different tuition rates are not the cyber charters’ fault. The cyber charters have refused to acknowledge that the funding system is both excessive and nonsensical. They would not so much as admit that the 1,000 different tuition rate system, resulting in wildly different tuition rates for the exact same school, doesn’t make sense. They have responded to the proposal of a flat $8,000 rate with shrieks of dismay, claiming that would destroy the industry, but they have never made a counter-offer.
In short, the cyber charters have simply refused to acknowledge that anything needs to be reformed, and have been unwilling to come to the table and talk about it.
So the legislature — including the GOP — moved on without them. And it happened quickly, a part of the swift attempt to finally get a budget passed.
The bill did not go as far as cyber critics would have liked, but it went much further than the cyber charters would have liked. Caught flat footed, they sent last-minute email arguing that the new formula would cost the industry $300 million, cause 2,000 layoffs, and put some cyber charters out of business. But this time the non-negotiation negotiation technique didn’t work.
The new law provides some financial relief for districts.
Charter tuition is computed by taking district expenditures, deducting certain costs, and dividing by the number of students. Cyber charter tuition calculations now include additional deductions for the sending district. The General Assembly calculates that the new formula will return $178 million taxpayer money to the districts.
The new accountability rules include a requirement to perform regular wellness checks on students (previously a point of contention with Commonwealth Charter Academy). Students may no longer simply enroll in cyber charters to escape truancy issues, and there are now stricter rules for tracking a student’s residence.
All of these new rules are in place right now, effective to the start in the fall of this school year.
At least two cyber charters have started cutting staff citing the new funding rules.
Republicans have indicated that this reform package closes the book, while Democrats believe there is more work to do. The Democrats are correct; Pennsylvania still has a system that pays 1,000 different tuition rates for the same exact service. But this year’s reform was a huge step forward on an issue that has seen no progress in decades.
Ebbing of Culture Panic
The elections this fall brought plenty of sad news for the GOP and MAGA, and that meant school boards as well. Bucks County was an exemplar of that shift. Once one of the centers of far-right Moms for Liberty school board shenanigans, Bucks County saw a massive rejection of culture panic governance and a call to return to school board members who actually worry about the nuts and bolts of helping a school district function.
Moms for Liberty claim that 17 of their endorsed school board candidates won their races across the country, but those were uncontested races. In contested races they were 0 for 31, a considerable drop from their heyday in 2021 and 2022, when hundreds of Moms for Liberty candidates swept into school boards across the country. They appear to know that the wind has shifted. At this year’s summit, as reported by Laura Pappano for Hechinger Report, Moms for Liberty leaders encouraged its members to focus less on school board seats and more on turning grievances into lawsuits.
READ: The Quiet Creep of Censorship: How ‘Everyday Banning’ Is Reshaping American Schools
The state Senate just gave a resounding bi-partisan confirmation to Dr. Carrie Rowe as the state secretary of education, a career educator who focuses on, well, education. This may seem like a simple, pedestrian decision. But other states have not been so fortunate. Oklahoma, for instance, labored for years under education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters, who was a constant source of controversy, tied himself directly to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, tried to put a Trump Bible in every classroom, passed social studies standards that required teachers to teach the “Big Lie” about 2020 Elections, backed an attempt to create a Christian charter school, and was so lax about showing up to do his actual job that conservatives working in his office quit. He was more interested in fighting culture wars than actually looking out for education in his state. Walters has left to lead an anti-teachers union union, and the state replaced him with someone more sober.
But states where leaders are in the throes of the same kind of culture panic that legislators like Doug Mastriano try to push are a mess. At the University of Oklahoma, a student tried to bluff her way through an assignment by saying the Bible tells her to hate trans people and got the F she earned; now the teaching assistant who gave her the dwell-deserved F has been fired. How do you recruit college instructors when your career can be ended by any 19-year-old who skips the reading and ignores the assignment but can cite Christian nationalist grievances?
Pennsylvania certainly still has its culture panic outposts, but the Shapiro administration has managed to hold the line. Back in the spring, the Trump administration demanded that states agree to follow Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which they have reinterpreted to mean the end of anything remotely resembling affirmative action or anti-discrimination; their theory is that DEI is illegal. In addition, the Department of Education memo demanded that states and local districts sign an oath saying they agree that the Trump theory must be accepted in order for the state to get money. Some states pushed back hard, and some complied in advance. Pennsylvania just said, “Well, of course we follow Article VI” without acknowledging the Trumpian interpretation, and we went about our business.
Trying To Push Choice
Huge amounts of money continue to flow into state politics. In education, two of the biggest players (per a March Spotlight PA report) are the Commonwealth Children’s Choice Fund and Students First PAC. Commonwealth Children’s Choice Fund gets most of its money from Students First PAC, and Students First PAC is just Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass dressed up in a PAC suit. And he is very, very interested in getting school vouchers into the Keystone State.
Not a year goes by that Harrisburg doesn’t see yet another attempt to launch taxpayer-funded school vouchers. This year Mastriano floated a voucher bill early on, a bill that was short, vague, and destined to languish and die in the education committee.
Vouchers (over and above the vouchers that we already have) have failed year after year in the state. That’s good news. In states like Florida and Ohio, the cost of voucher programs is straining the budget. Costs keep spiraling even as studies show that most vouchers are not used by poor students struggling to escape “failing schools,” but by well-to-do families that were already enrolled in private schools.
The hope among Pennsylvania voucher fans is now on the federal voucher program. States have the chance to opt in to this program that, like our (Educational Improvement Tax Credits (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credits (OSTC) programs, allow folks to contribute to funding a school voucher in place of paying their taxes. But a federal voucher program would not solve issues with transparency (where is the money going and how well is it being spent) nor discrimination (private schools can reject any student for any reason).
Federal Shenanigans
The Trump administration has claimed it is sending education back to the states. It is not.
Most decision-making for education is at the state level anyway. The over-simplified explanation of the federal Department of Education has two parts. First, the feds created funding streams meant to give the states the ability to level the education playing field, and with them, some civil rights law to make sure that states actually the levelling. That’s mainly Title I for low-income communities, and IDEA for students with specials needs. Second, Jimmy Carter, who had promised a cabinet-level Education Department (and who wanted to be re-elected) proposed the department as a way to collect, organize, and administer the various policies.
Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are undoing the second part by dispersing the funds to various other departments. They have tied to undo the civil rights piece by redefining whose civil rights need to be protected (spoiler alert: white guys). They cannot undo the actual funding streams, but they do hope to turn them into block grants — a pile of money that states can use however they wish, regardless of their original purpose.
The federal government’s power over states (e.g. Common Core, high stakes testing) has always come by slapping contingencies on the funding streams. New secretaries swear they aren’t going to do that, but the power always seems too much to resist (see above requirement for states to sign Title VI oath).
Stories To Watch In 2026
Everyone in every sector will be watching AI. Education faces several separate AI challenges. The most obvious is that students are automating their work and teachers are scrambling for ways to get students to actually learn something. At the same time, a host of businesses are trying to convince teachers (or their bosses) that there is actually some practical AI use for teachers. Meanwhile, I have multiple reports that administrators are successfully using AI to take care of their correspondence, creating memos that are longer, duller, and less useful than ever before.
Also, several cases are working their way toward the Supreme Court, where they will challenge the separation between church and state when it comes to education. Can taxpayers be required to fund a religious charter school? Are charter schools private or public, and therefor bound to or exempt from certain laws? We may get an answer this year.
Bottom Line
It could have been worse. We could have continued to let cyber charters drain taxpayer funds. We could have continued down the path of opposing diversity and repressing reading. We could have drained the public school system in order to fund a private, religious one for the select few. We could have gone full MAGA and elevated more Christian nationalist leaders. Other states have done all those things. We may not have made great strides forward this year, but we didn’t follow Florida, Ohio, or Texas – and that’s not nothing.
