Pennsylvania has been a trailblazer in educational opportunity. Long before school choice became a national movement, the good people of our great commonwealth helped prove that empowering families — not bureaucracies — could change lives.

In 2001, Pennsylvania became one of the first states in the nation to adopt a tax-credit scholarship program: the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC). Then, in 2012, Pennsylvania added another program: the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC).

EITC and OSTC opened doors for hundreds of thousands of students in need of options beyond their assigned school. This bold, bipartisan idea was rooted in a simple truth: Our kids deserve a high-quality education regardless of their zip code.

This successful idea helped fuel a nationwide education revolution. Educational choice has swept across the nation. Other states took what worked in Pennsylvania, expanded it, and ran with it. Many states — such as Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, and Ohio — have adopted universal or near-universal access to education scholarship accounts.

The Pennsylvania model also made its way into the Beltway. Federal lawmakers, inspired by our EITC and OSTC programs, enacted a new federal tax-credit scholarship program, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC).

The FSTC allows individuals to make tax-deductible donations of up to $1,700 to scholarship-granting organizations nationwide. The nation’s children can now benefit from Pennsylvania’s innovation.

Despite all this success, Pennsylvania must keep our education choice momentum moving forward. Today, according to EdChoice, Pennsylvania ranks 13th nationally in the percentage of students served by educational choice programs.

We need to give more Pennsylvania families the opportunity to choose a school that works for them, and we need to act now. Our children depend on it.

Sadly, too many students remain stuck in failing schools. More than 200,000 students attend one of Pennsylvania’s “low-achieving” schools — the 380 schools that comprise the bottom 15% of statewide testing. This testing revealed that some of these schools had zero students score at grade level for math. I repeat: zero! That’s simply unconscionable.

The overall academic achievement in our public schools is either stagnant or declining, despite record-level spending increases in public education. Clearly, throwing more money into a broken system is not the answer.

Not only are parents worried about academics, but they are also fearful for the safety of their kids at school. Statewide, more than one-third of Pennsylvania schools meet the federal definition of “persistently dangerous.” The problem is even more acute in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with 71% and 89%, respectively, meeting the definition. How can these kids possibly learn when they are not safe?

All of this leaves me wondering, how did we get here, and what can we do about it?

The answer is not complicated: We must put kids first. But entrenched government unions and political leadership in Harrisburg have spent years blocking meaningful reform. Special interests have selfishly preserved a broken system and ignored students’ needs.

That resistance to change was on full display with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s handling of the Lifeline Scholarship Program. After campaigning on his promise to enact the program, the governor vetoed it from the state budget, turning his back on kids trapped in failing schools. Since his betrayal, he has not once proposed increased educational choice or Lifeline Scholarships in any of his three budget proposals.

Even more troubling, he has refused to commit to opting Pennsylvania into the FSTC–a program that would not take any money from public schools and would generate an estimated $483 million in donations to scholarships, according to a recent projection.

Pennsylvania does not need to invent something new. We already know what works. We proved it more than two decades ago, and we are still reaping those benefits. During the 2023-24 school year, Pa. scholarship organizations award more than 101,000 K-12 scholarships, about 15,000 more than the prior year.

But there is still room for improvement. Despite these successes, about 69,000 applicants were turned away because of program limits. Demand has outpaced supply, and it is incumbent upon us to fix that shortage.

We need the courage to finish what we started — to expand what has been successful, remove arbitrary caps, enact innovative new programs, and ensure that opportunity is not reserved for the lucky few.

The time to act is now. Our children’s academic achievement does not patiently wait for political delays. Every year without expanded education choice leaves more students behind, compounding achievement gaps and propelling more students into failure.

We must empower the good people of our great commonwealth with genuine educational choice and, once again, lead the nation in putting students first.

Pennsylvania’s kids deserve nothing less.

Megan Martin, a former state Senate parliamentarian, is the chief operating officer and general counsel for the Commonwealth Foundation.