Remember when Democrats made great political hay out of all those Republican governors who, driven by crass political calculation, refused to opt in to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in their states, thereby denying their own constituents’ coverage? Kind of the literal definition of governmental malpractice, no?
Well, get ready, because the wingtip is about to be on the other foot. It’s now likely that Democratic governors will soon be the ones failing to opt in for free federal money — at the expense of their own electorate. Why? Simply because said dollars come from Trump.
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Here in the Keystone State, Governor Josh Shapiro faces a fascinating choice. Might he be the first to deviate from the party line? If he makes the bold political move, it could set him up as a visionary in a currently visionless party — not to mention as a leader willing to stand up to a powerful interest group (the teachers’ union) in service of his own constituents. It would be a move akin to Bill Clinton’s 1992 “Sister Soulja moment,” when the then-candidate was willing to broaden his electoral base by challenging his party’s orthodoxy on race.
Here the defining issue would be education, which is also kinda all about race. The background: I refer to a little-noticed law embedded in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — ECCA, which stands for the Educational Choice for Children Act. The bill represents the first national school choice program in history. It’s a federal dollar-for-dollar tax credit for individuals — up to $1,700 — for donations made to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). These SGOs, in turn, fund scholarships and other education services, like tutoring and book costs, for students in both private and public schools. While the donation amount to an SGO is capped, the scholarship dollars SGOs can offer is not. The rules have yet to be written by the Treasury Department, but for someone like Shapiro, who authentically believes that “every child of God” has a divine right to a high-quality education, there’s clearly a moral and political opening here. And don’t believe the hype that ECCA will be siphoning funds or middle-class students from the public schools; while the law makes household incomes of $91,000 the eligibility threshold, governors are said to have vast discretion when it comes to implementation. Want to disproportionately benefit Philly kids? Shapiro will presumably be able to do that.
The cure for a broken education model
Teachers’ union opposition notwithstanding, the politics line up. After all, Shapiro’s party has lost its political advantage on the issue of education. Ten years ago, according to Democrats for Education Reform, the party had a 26 point advantage over Republicans in voter trust on education, a lead that has all but evaporated as red states experiment with ESAs (Education Savings Accounts), vouchers and startup innovations like microschools, while Dems defend a failing status quo by championing inputs without regard to outcomes. How, after all, is it possible that only 17 percent of fourth graders in our city read at grade level, and yet the District boasts of an increasing graduation rate? Can you square those two? How is it that $4.5 billion is not enough to educate 200,000 kids? How is it that, in the nation’s most recent educational report card, only 31 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, down from both 2022 and 2019? We’re getting our ass kicked, and no one on the team seems even slightly worked up about it.
There are green shoots of hope and innovation going on, but they ain’t in the blue states. In the aforementioned report card, Louisiana was the only state to beat its 2019 reading scores. (Might that have something to do with the state’s “Let Teachers Teach” strategy, which embraces — gasp — classroom standards and discipline?) Of all places, Mississippi’s emphasis on phonics has resulted in a turnaround being dubbed a “miracle.”
Here in Philly, folks, we’re on a longstanding losing streak. If we were a sports team, the fan base would be calling for the coach and general manager to, uh, spend more time with their respective families. Have you read Superintendent Watlington’s strategic plan? Are you confident out-of-the-box thinking is the order of the day when not once is the term “artificial intelligence” even mentioned, let alone considered as a way to either fuel learning or engaged as a threat with which to contend?
“Leadership is about having the vision to look around the bend, the eloquence to describe what you see, and the courage to act on it. That’s how you become the leader of the free world.” — Jorge Elorza, Democrats for Education Reform
Given the moribund state of things — not to mention the fact that roughly 75 percent of African Americans support school choice — a Democrat who shrugs off progressive invective by opting in to ECCA even though Donald Trump’s short-fingered prints are all over it might just distinguish him or herself nationally. Enter Shapiro, who flirted with passing a voucher pilot two years ago. That was a heavier lift than simply opting in to ECCA.
Jorge Elorza is the former two-term Democratic mayor of Providence, Rhode Island who now leads Democrats for Education Reform. Last year, he was a guest on our How to Really Run a City podcast. He says it’s a “no-brainer” for Democratic governors to get beyond their disdain for Trump and opt in. “It costs you nothing as a state,” he says. “It is literally free money. And if you turn it down, it’ll be money leaving your state and going to support kids in other states.” The latter is a key point: Donors will make their donations, SGOs will underwrite their scholarships, but if a blue state doesn’t opt in? All those dollars will just flow to red states. You really want to subsidize the “Mississippi Miracle” and own the current educational status quo as a political issue?
“Education will look different in the future than it looks today,” Elorza says. “What is required of Democrats is summoning our imagination of what comes next. And clinging to the past is a mistake because it misses the magnitude of the moment.”
That said, being the first Democratic governor to opt in requires vast courage, maybe the kind only possessed by a governor who sits at 59 percent in the polls, ninth in the nation — as ours does. To check Elorza, I reached out to one of the nation’s savviest political strategists, who laid out the practical roadblocks for Shapiro.
“Yes, opting in to ECCA would be differentiating in a presidential primary, but it would also agitate the teachers’ union, which is not insignificant,” he said. “Remember, the next political hurdle in front of Josh is re-election in 2026. Opting in could make [school choice mega-donor] Jeff Yass less inclined to spend against him, but two years ago, every Democrat in the statehouse voted against vouchers, so it would be potentially alienating to them.”
It is principles or is it politics?
Speaking of Yass, there was our very own prince of darkness in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this week, weighing in with a particularly progressive take on ECCA In a letter headlined Will Democratic Governors Choose Kids Over Campaign Cash. It could be seen as a challenge to Shapiro. ”If blue states embrace it, [ECCA] would provide scholarships that are popular within Black and Hispanic communities, that provide low-income children access to a safe and quality education, and that don’t cost states a penny,” Yass wrote. “This is only a hard thing to say yes to if governors prioritize pleasing teachers’ unions that provide them political contributions above securing low-income children a good education.”
Why the widespread lack of courage among Democrats? Yass would say it’s fealty to the teachers’ union, and there’s certainly something to that. But it also has to do with being cowed by a certain vulgarian who shall not be named. “It’s also important to keep in mind that the consequence of having a President who wakes up every day and whose explicit aim is making Democrats — not just progressives — unhappy is that Democrats don’t want anything to do with anything Trump supports,” said the political consultant I reached out to. “Tariffs, for example, used to have some Democratic support, but it’s now in the single digits among Democrats. So Josh supporting ‘Trump’s education scheme’ would not go over well with a lot of Democrats — and not just the far left.”
“This is only a hard thing to say yes to if governors prioritize pleasing teachers’ unions that provide them political contributions above securing low-income children a good education.” — Jeff Yass in the Wall Street Journal
Well, so much for that, heh? Except that Elorza is on to something when he argues that the current fever afflicting our politics will only break once some antibiotic enters the system. In politics, such medicine is usually the emergence of a leader willing to take a leap of faith. FDR had no clue that deficit spending on programs like Social Security and the Civilian Conservation Corps would lead a nation out of the Great Depression. When Truman spent what would be $150 billion today on rebuilding Europe amid post-World War II’s rubble, he had to wonder if his opponents, who called the Marshall Plan a “wasteful operation rat-hole,” were right. When George W. Bush did more to eradicate AIDS in Africa than anyone before or since, it was a principled gamble by an embattled president. JFK was hesitant to back civil rights as “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution,” but he — a first-term president who had barely won election — made that case on national TV, and the zeitgeist started to shift.
A candidate today who risks political standing by embracing experimentation on behalf of serving the interests of our kids? Is our Overton window so tightly drawn shut that that’s a nonstarter now?
“Leadership isn’t about doing what’s safe,” argues Elorza, a reformer who took on the teachers’ union in his first term as mayor and cruised to reelection. For 20 years, I’ve had an ongoing conversation with Josh Shapiro about how leaders enact change in politics. We talk as much about Robert Caro’s treatises on LBJ and Richard Reeves’ portrait of Kennedy in power as we do lamenting the fate of our Sixers. And this is what I hope he takes away from those tomes, for the sake of the Commonwealth’s children: Leadership is about having the vision to look around the bend, the eloquence to describe what you see, and the courage to act on it. That’s how you become the leader of the free world.
Corrections: Jorge Elorza is the former mayor of Providence, RI and the current CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, a PAC and advocacy group.
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