Mark Pinsley, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania Senate District 16, opposes school vouchers. His main objection is about money: Pennsylvania already spends more than half a billion dollars a year sending public money to private schools — and state law forbids anyone from finding out what it bought.
Jarrett Coleman, the Republican incumbent, is a co-sponsor of Senate Bill 10, a voucher program called the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success, or PASS. (SB 10)
What Pennsylvania already spends
Pennsylvania doesn’t call them vouchers. It runs them through the tax code. Businesses get state tax credits for donating to groups that hand out private and religious school scholarships.
- $575 million a year in the 2025–26 budget.
- The program started in 2001 at $20 million. It has cost about $3.5 billion since.
- A family of four earning up to about $157,000 qualifies.
- Scholarship groups can keep up to 10% for themselves.
Here’s what stands out to an auditor: state law bans collecting data on students’ test results or their families’ incomes. Pennsylvania spends $575 million a year on a program and has made it illegal to check whether it works or who it helps.
As Lehigh County Controller, Pinsley has argued that public money comes with a duty to report how it’s spent. A program built so no one can audit it fails that test — whatever you think about school choice.
What the PASS bill would add
Senate Bill 10 would pay private school tuition directly from the state budget for students in the lowest-performing schools. That money would compete directly with funding for public schools — while the state is still under a court order to fix how it funds them.
The Senate Education Committee passed SB 10 8–3 in May 2025. Coleman co-sponsored it, sits on that committee and voted to send it to the full Senate (SB 10 committee vote).
The bigger cost: cyber charter schools
The largest drain on school districts isn’t vouchers — it’s cyber charter tuition.
Under a 2002 formula, a school district pays a cyber charter school based on what the district spends per student, not what online school actually costs. So districts pay very different prices for the same online program:
| District | Regular education | Special education |
|---|---|---|
| Bethlehem Area | $15,276 | $30,693 |
| Parkland | $15,051 | $32,160 |
| Allentown | $13,598 | $30,168 |
Pennsylvania’s Republican Auditor General audited five cyber charters and called for reform. He found:
- Their revenue nearly doubled in three years, from $473 million to $898 million.
- They built up $425 million more than they spent.
- One operator spent $196 million on 21 buildings — for online schools.
(Pennsylvania Auditor General)
None of that is illegal. It’s what the formula allows.
The fix that’s stuck in Coleman’s committee
House Bill 1500 would cap cyber charter tuition at $8,000 per regular education student. The House estimated that it would save public school districts about $616 million a year statewide. Local districts projected savings of roughly $3.4 million each for Bethlehem Area and Allentown, and $1 million for Parkland. (HB 1500)
It passed the House in June 2025 and went to the Senate Education Committee, where it has sat ever since.
Coleman sits on that committee. It moved the voucher bill in about four months. It has held the cyber charter fix for more than fifteen. Parkland, where Coleman served on the school board, would keep about $1 million a year under HB 1500.
Who funds the push
In the 2022 election cycle, Coleman’s campaign received $883,621.50 from political committees funded by Jeffrey Yass, the billionaire who is Pennsylvania’s biggest funder of school-choice causes. The money came from the committees, not from Yass personally.
Coleman held these views before that money arrived, and many legislators share them without it. But voters should know that the biggest private backer of vouchers was also the biggest backer of his campaign.
Pinsley’s argument
Vouchers drain public schools. When students leave, a public school doesn’t get smaller in proportion — it still has to keep classrooms, buses and special education services ready for any child who enrolls. So it doesn’t get smaller. It gets poorer.
On school choice: Pinsley understands why a parent with a struggling child wants options. But the current program isn’t aimed at those families, and the state has forbidden itself from learning who gets the money. The better answer is to fix the school that serves the whole community.
What he’d do instead:
- Publish results and family incomes for the scholarship programs.
- Have the Auditor General audit the scholarship groups.
- Replace the 2002 cyber charter formula with one based on what online school actually costs.
The cyber charter tuition cap in House Bill 1500 would save school districts hundreds of millions of dollars a year, without raising any taxes. A vote for Mark Pinsley could get it done.
District 16 covers parts of Lehigh and Bucks counties. The general election is November 3, 2026.
