New bill supports voucher system - Daily Local News 2/7/2011

The Daily Local (dailylocal.com), Serving Chester County, PA

New bill supports voucher system
State lawmakers consider law reallocating public money for educating students from low-performing public schools
Monday, February 7, 2011

By EVAN BRANDT, Special to the Local News

A controversial bill introduced in Harrisburg that would allow low-income students to leave low-performing public schools and use public money to be educated elsewhere would focus first on 144 of the lowest performing public schools in Pennsylvania, none of which are in Chester or Montgomery counties.

But by its third year, the law would implement a statewide voucher system that would permit public money to be used to send students to private and parochial schools.

One key Chester County-based legislator hopes to play a critical role in changing this third-year provision.

The bipartisan bill has been co-sponsored in the state Senate by Republican Sen. Jeff Piccola, whose district includes Dauphin and York counties, including Harrisburg, and who chairs the senate's education committee; and by Democrat Sen. Anthony Williams, who represents Philadelphia and Delaware County and recently succeeded the late Sen. Mike O'Pake as Democratic whip.

Called Senate Bill 1, the proposal has the support of Pennsylvania's new governor, Tom Corbett, whose campaign platform included implementing "school choice" in the Keystone state.

State Sen. Andrew Dinniman, D-19th, of West Whiteland, education committee minority chairman, said he strongly supports the portions of the bill that focus on those 144 failing schools, but he opposes the creation of a statewide voucher system. He says vouchers would siphon money away from schools that work as well as those which demonstrably do not.

In its first year, Senate Bill 1 would allow the state's per-student subsidy money to a district to be used by low-income students attending certain public schools to pay tuition at a school of their choice.

The bill sets the standards for identifying low-performing schools. According to a list provided by Piccola's office, the 144 designated public schools include 91 in Philadelphia, 12 in Harrisburg, 12 in Pittsburgh and nine in Delaware County.

Reading High School and the Gateway School for International Business and Language in Reading are also on that list.

In its second year, the bill would allow any low-income student living within the attendance area of a poor-performing school to use the state subsidy money to attend a different school, either public or private.

In its third year, however, the proposal would abandon all necessity that a student be associated with a poorly performing school and would allow all low-income students to use public funds for tuition, which the bill describes as "scholarships."

The bill defines low-income as being within 130 percent of the federal poverty index, which Dinniman said is essentially the same as those who are eligible for the free-and-reduced lunch program. That criteria describes at least half the students in Pottstown schools.

According to materials from Piccola's office, a household of two with an annual income of $18,941 in 2010 would qualify; a 2010 household income of $23,803 would qualify a family of three and a four-member family which brought in $28,665 in 2010 would qualify as well.

As voucher proposals have in the past, this proposal has attracted passionate responses from supporters and advocates alike.

In an article highlighting U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner's support for Catholic education and school choice during a Jan. 26 event, the Catholic News Agency made specific mention of the Pennsylvania proposal.

A decade ago, many Pennsylvanians were "somewhat on the fence" on the question of providing educational vouchers and tax credits to low income families, Sean McAleer, head of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, told the Catholic News Agency.

"This time, it's a total change," McAleer is quoted as saying. "The public outcry has been unbelievable."

Not so, says the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, among the bill's primary opponents.

On its website, PSBA cites a 2010 poll by Terry Madonna Opinion Research that concluded that 67 percent of those 805 Pennsylvanians polled "oppose giving public money to parents so they can sent their children to a private school."

But Piccola, who first proposed school vouchers 16 years ago, expected the opposition of both the PSBA and the statewide teachers association, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, or PSEA, and has come out swinging.

During a Jan. 28 rally in Harrisburg in support of the measure, Piccola reportedly said, "Vouchers is not a four-letter word. PSEA is a four-letter word. PSBA is a four-letter word."

Further, in a release posted on his website, Piccola called the PSBA "advocates for protecting turf and ultimately protecting the employment of adults. As an association, they have no credibility on this issue in the General Assembly, nor, frankly on many other issues, because they fear offending their allies, the teachers' unions."

Neither group has responded with as much colorful language, but both are clearly of opposing minds.

PSEA points out that although public money would be funneled to private and parochial schools under the proposal, those schools are not required "to administer the same standardized tests to measure student progress or the effectiveness of the program," thus making them less accountable than public schools for the spending of public money.

"We shouldn't be abandoning struggling schools and implementing costly new government bureaucracy simply because it looks like a silver bullet solution," PSEA President Jim Testerman said on the group's website.

From Dinniman's standpoint, both sides are right — and both are wrong.

He absolutely agrees with the bill's sponsors that for the 144 schools identified as the worst performing, the time has come to offer the students who attend them another option.

"Think about it, many of those schools have been in the bottom 5 percent for over a decade and we have reached a point where something has to be done," Dinniman said. "We have had an entire generation go through schools that the state has said are essentially failing."

The proposal's first two years "provides students trapped in a failing school a way out," he said.

But if vouchers — or "scholarships" — are a way out of failing schools, they are also a way to undermine schools that are not failing, said Dinniman.

"We have schools in Chester and Montgomery counties that are among the top schools in the state. Why would we take resources away from schools that work?" Dinniman asked, adding that scenario would inevitably lead to increased property taxes as local districts try to make up for missing state subsidies.

Consider, he said, that for the first time in recent memory, the state is likely to provide less aid to public schools than in the previous year, thanks to the expiration of the two-year federal stimulus money that was used to plug Pennsylvania's education budget.

"All this discussion of education reform is taking place in a time of no money," Dinniman said. "The state government can sing the praises of not raising taxes, but because the Legislature has failed to do any meaningful tax reform, the burden of all this will end up falling on the local property tax payers."

A public hearing on the proposal is scheduled for Feb. 16 and a vote to move the proposal out of the education committee to the full Senate will likely happen in late February or early March, Dinniman said.

When the time comes, Dinniman said he plans to offer an amendment that would eliminate the third-year voucher plan that extends to all low-income families and instead expand upon another portion of the proposal which he favors.

The proposal also calls for increasing the cap on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit, which allows businesses to receive a tax break for making contributions to education efforts.

Dinniman, who said the program "is always sold out within a month," should be expanded further to provide an alternative source of revenue and "get some private sector funding invested into education efforts that run a whole spectrum."

"Voucher advocates say (vouchers are) THE answer, but the truth of the matter is there is no one answer to how students learn, there is no silver bullet," Dinniman said.

"The question should not be public versus private versus charter versus cyber-charter," Dinniman said. "The question should be: What is the best learning environment for each of the different styles of learning, and how do we best fund them?"

Whatever happens, Dinniman predicted that "for the next four months, we are going to be reviewing and considering more major changes in education than we have seen in the last 50 years in this Commonwealth."

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