Irony and Insanity come to Fruition in the Pa Senate

The Senate Education Committee voted to continue down the path of irony and insanity by passing Senate Bill 1.  It is now rapidly careening down the path of self destruction and calling the proposed school voucher bill an “opportunity scholarship”.

The bill, intended to help the state’s poorest children from the lowest-performing schools by providing options of attending other public, private or parochial schools, did not pass the committee without debate.  The troubling issues that many of us have discussed, including constitutionality, religious freedom and the cost to public schools were sticking points for two members of the committee.

The Senate Education Committee is composed of six Republicans and four Democrats. Co-sponsoring the proposed legislation is Democratic Sen. Anthony Williams and Senate Education Committee Chair Jeffrey Piccola (R-Dauphin).  All six Republicans supported the bill, as did two Democrats, Williams and Sen. Andy Dinniman.  Dinniman had some suggested amendments to the bill, including testing and accountability from the non-public schools.  This was a simple request in light of the fact that frequent rhetoric coming from our Legislative leaders on data driven decision making.  They weren’t even considered. Why would the proponents of Vouchers and or Charter Schools continue to hide from research driven analysis of their programs?  Because what little research we do have, like the Milwaukee and Cleveland reports, indicate at best marginal success and at worst, like the Cleveland study for the 2010 student progress, shows that Public Schools outperformed their Voucher student counterparts in every area between the grades 3 to 9! 

Democrats Jim Ferlo and Daylin Leach were the members of the committee opposing school voucher bill.

Leach debated the proposed legislation on the grounds that the bill is not constitutional.  A view that I happen to concur with as do many other legal scholars despite the Supreme Court’s decision in 2002 case Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris.

 Ferlo and Leach are concerned that the voucher system could erode public schools whereas the others feel that the legislation actually offers a lifeline to those children trapped in the low-performing schools. The opposing sides present two distinctly different ways of looking at the same situation.  Piccola suggests that Leach’s argument that the school voucher legislation is unconstitutional is an erroneous interpretation of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The chair of the Senate Education Committee also dismissed the argument that the bill is in conflict with the state constitution in regards to support of religious schools with public money.

With all the questions swirling around this legislation, why did the Senate Education Committee seemingly just push it along through the system?  Usually, I would be complaining about the slowness of government process, but it is amazing the way this school voucher bill is bulldozing its way through Harrisburg.

Aside from the many questions, concerns and debates swirling around this voucher bill, why don’t we hear much about the cost of this ‘opportunity scholarship’? Is it simply that if the proponents told the truth about this approach they would have to acknowledge that much like in the case of Milwaukee, Cleveland and Florida tax payers were required to kick in more money to make up for the reduction in school district subsidies, sub-contracting of services, substantially larger class sizes, elimination of related arts programs such as music and arts, after-school programs and furloughs!

Gov. Corbett swept into the Governor’s office under the umbrella of austerity and budget constraints.  Can someone please explain to me how the estimated $1billion dollars in taxpayer costs by the end of the third-year phase of the voucher program meet that mission?  This 1billion does not take into consideration the dollars the bill will siphon from the public schools. 

Our newly elected Governor will introduce a budget that takes another 1 billion in state aid from PA’s school districts.

 Let me put that into some context for you.

The State’s share of Public education amounts to 5.1 billion dollars; so we are now planning to take one-fifth of the largest share of school district revenues away!

 Recently the Governor put a 364 million dollar freeze on state spending; of that amount 337 million was school funding.

 Why choose school funding for the largest share of this freeze: simple, because it could be made up by federal stimulus dollars.

 School Superintendents were informed of this freeze last Thursday by e-mail.!

The state is using 387 million dollars of unspent Federal jobs monies to help balance this year’s budget.

 The legislature is also using 654 million in federal stimulus monies to bridge the gap this year. Does anyone other than me see the absolute Irony in this approach! These very same Politicos’s constantly lamenting the infringement of the Federal Government in State matters: Yet they have absolutely no problem claiming how they wonderfully balanced our budget without revealing the fact that they used the federal villainous Federal Governments dollars to do it! If that is not the height of hypocrisy then I do not know its real face!

 There is a 1 billion dollar hole that needs to be filled next year!

This budget also sets the state’s expenditure levels for Education back to the 2005-06 levels!

Again who will be affected by this?

 Local School Districts and Boards will be required to raise taxes to make up the difference because legislative mandates will not have been taken off their backs by those in Harrisburg who preach fiscal responsibility.

This is not a new tactic! A previous Governor followed the exact same path in making himself appear to be a fiscal conservative by passing program costs on to County Governments and Local School Boards. Indeed he may have been the one who sent us down the road toward our current Pension Crisis!

Local Districts may be asked to pay more and still have to cut programs so that our Legislative Leaders can again engage in the oldest charade and shell game of all – “shift the blame”.  They tout a new program as if it would not raise state taxes. No tax increase at the state level but for local governments that is another matter.  The money has to come from somewhere!!

 Just one last question; How do our elected officials justify risking 2 to 4 billion dollars of taxpayer monies on programs, that as my last article argues are unproven and at the very best marginally successful on the academic performance side and certainly more costly on the fiscal side?

Vouchers an Exercise in Irony

As I stated in my last article on Pa. Senate Bill 1 which was never published{ So I added it here Irony and Insanity}; Not sure why? But in that article I made several observations about voucher initiatives nationally;1.}the research is at best uncertain and at worst a multi-billion dollar boon-doggly! 2.} there is no proven track record of them working any better than their public school counterparts. 3.} when the advocates for vouchers and choice are faced with the statistical realities they resort to excuses that they use to call scapegoating by the public school community. 4.} Vouchers have no track record of being a financial benefit to the state. 5.} Cleveland results are Even more compelling in terms of public school students out performing voucher programs. 6.} Pa legislature is taking the same approach it took with bi-lingual education ; we try to adopt it after other States like California and Arizona do away with it after an unsuccessful experiment with it for years! We are now trying to do the same thing with vouchers. 7.} I am last person on earth to suggest we in the public school system need to make major improvements in many areas, but lets not destroy the system that has made America the greatest country on earth. Lets not destroy the middle classes opportunity to occur economically by destroying public education. 8.} Make no mistake about it this absolutely not about improving education but rather an all out effort to destroy public education. 9.} I have often said to truly shape significant change i our system of Education , we must take it down to its very foundation and then rebuild it not the stop gap add-on approach we have been utilizing for the last 30 years!. 10.} the last thing we need is anothe rUn proven billion dollar  bureaucracy to truly reform education!

Enjoy the readings the full report which I have attached is well worth your time to read. It gives extra-ordinary insight into the issues especially for those of you who consider yourselves to b e Psycometricians.

P.S. Note the fact that this is the first time in the over 20 year history of the program that voucher students had to take the test! the irony is the legislature who pushed this approach are saying that one standardized test does tell you how successful a school is? Remember when public school advocates use to say that and were told they were obstructionists to reform. Is not IRONY GRAND1 Is not Political hypocrisy's amazing!

Irony and Insanity come to Fruition in the Pa Senate:

 The Senate Education Committee voted to continue down the path of irony and insanity by passing Senate Bill 1.  It is now rapidly careening down the path of self destruction and calling the proposed school voucher bill an “opportunity scholarship”.

The bill, intended to help the state’s poorest children from the lowest-performing schools by providing options of attending other public, private or parochial schools, did not pass the committee without debate.  The troubling issues that many of us have discussed, including constitutionality, religious freedom and the cost to public schools were sticking points for two members of the committee.

The Senate Education Committee is composed of six Republicans and four Democrats. Co-sponsoring the proposed legislation is Democratic Sen. Anthony Williams and Senate Education Committee Chair Jeffrey Piccola (R-Dauphin).  All six Republicans supported the bill, as did two Democrats, Williams and Sen. Andy Dinniman.  Dinniman had some suggested amendments to the bill, including testing and accountability from the non-public schools.  This was a simple request in light of the fact that frequent rhetoric coming from our Legislative leaders on data driven decision making.  They weren’t even considered. Why would the proponents of Vouchers and or Charter Schools continue to hide from research driven analysis of their programs?  Because what little research we do have, like the Milwaukee and Cleveland reports, indicate at best marginal success and at worst, like the Cleveland study for the 2010 student progress, shows that Public Schools outperformed their Voucher student counterparts in every area between the grades 3 to 9! 

Democrats Jim Ferlo and Daylin Leach were the members of the committee opposing school voucher bill.

Leach debated the proposed legislation on the grounds that the bill is not constitutional.  A view that I happen to concur with as do many other legal scholars despite the Supreme Court’s decision in 2002 case Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris.

 Ferlo and Leach are concerned that the voucher system could erode public schools whereas the others feel that the legislation actually offers a lifeline to those children trapped in the low-performing schools. The opposing sides present two distinctly different ways of looking at the same situation.  Piccola suggests that Leach’s argument that the school voucher legislation is unconstitutional is an erroneous interpretation of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The chair of the Senate Education Committee also dismissed the argument that the bill is in conflict with the state constitution in regards to support of religious schools with public money.

With all the questions swirling around this legislation, why did the Senate Education Committee seemingly just push it along through the system?  Usually, I would be complaining about the slowness of government process, but it is amazing the way this school voucher bill is bulldozing its way through Harrisburg.

Aside from the many questions, concerns and debates swirling around this voucher bill, why don’t we hear much about the cost of this ‘opportunity scholarship’? Is it simply that if the proponents told the truth about this approach they would have to acknowledge that much like in the case of Milwaukee, Cleveland and Florida tax payers were required to kick in more money to make up for the reduction in school district subsidies, sub-contracting of services, substantially larger class sizes, elimination of related arts programs such as music and arts, after-school programs and furloughs!

Gov. Corbett swept into the Governor’s office under the umbrella of austerity and budget constraints.  Can someone please explain to me how the estimated $1billion dollars in taxpayer costs by the end of the third-year phase of the voucher program meet that mission?  This 1billion does not take into consideration the dollars the bill will siphon from the public schools. 

Our newly elected Governor will introduce a budget that takes another 1 billion in state aid from PA’s school districts.

 Let me put that into some context for you.

The State’s share of Public education amounts to 5.1 billion dollars; so we are now planning to take one-fifth of the largest share of school district revenues away!

 Recently the Governor put a 364 million dollar freeze on state spending; of that amount 337 million was school funding.

 Why choose school funding for the largest share of this freeze: simple, because it could be made up by federal stimulus dollars.

 School Superintendents were informed of this freeze last Thursday by e-mail.!

The state is using 387 million dollars of unspent Federal jobs monies to help balance this year’s budget.

 The legislature is also using 654 million in federal stimulus monies to bridge the gap this year. Does anyone other than me see the absolute Irony in this approach! These very same Politicos’s constantly lamenting the infringement of the Federal Government in State matters: Yet they have absolutely no problem claiming how they wonderfully balanced our budget without revealing the fact that they used the federal villainous Federal Governments dollars to do it! If that is not the height of hypocrisy then I do not know its real face!

 There is a 1 billion dollar hole that needs to be filled next year!

This budget also sets the state’s expenditure levels for Education back to the 2005-06 levels!

Again who will be affected by this?

 Local School Districts and Boards will be required to raise taxes to make up the difference because legislative mandates will not have been taken off their backs by those in Harrisburg who preach fiscal responsibility.

This is not a new tactic! A previous Governor followed the exact same path in making himself appear to be a fiscal conservative by passing program costs on to County Governments and Local School Boards. Indeed he may have been the one who sent us down the road toward our current Pension Crisis!

Local Districts may be asked to pay more and still have to cut programs so that our Legislative Leaders can again engage in the oldest charade and shell game of all – “shift the blame”.  They tout a new program as if it would not raise state taxes. No tax increase at the state level but for local governments that is another matter.  The money has to come from somewhere!!

 Just one last question; How do our elected officials justify risking 2 to 4 billion dollars of taxpayer monies on programs, that as my last article states are unproven and at the very best marginally successful on the academic performance side and certainly more costly on the fiscal side?

Senate Bill 1: A classic illustration of the definition of Insanity

On March 1st of 2011 the Pennsylvania Legislature and its Senate Education Committee will demonstrate its inability to avoid following failed or unproven programs and initiatives.

The vote on Senate Bill 1 is a vote which could potentially remove 1 billion dollars from already cash strapped school districts in our state.

 Local school districts must pay for each student who uses a voucher out of its funds.  The cost is often more than the real dollars allotted for each public school student.  Therefore, the local district ends up spending much more of its monies on students going to other schools than it does on its own students.

The following Tuesday our new governor will introduce his first fiscal budget, by all accounts that budget will reduce spending on public education by another 1 billion dollars! A situation he did not create but has inherited do to the kick the can approach of many Governors and Legislatures before him.

So in a matter of two weeks public schools in our state could get hit with a loss of 2 billion dollars in revenue that will be added to the current 4 billion dollar state-wide budget shortfall.

For what?  So that a number of centrally located school districts can provide vouchers to some of their students! Senate Bill 1 would institute state sanctioned and funded vouchers.  Who will make up this budget shortfall in areas like ours where the districts will receive little to nothing in real or perceived assistance from this initiative?

The history of the state funded for-profit vouchers and their related success is at best unclear and at worst another mythical success akin to the great for- profit Charter School experiment. The limited research we do have tells us that vouchers are directly linked to for-profit Charters or Catholic schools in that there is where most students wind up going.

The history of State funded vouchers really begins with the Milwaukee Experiment in the 1990; therefore it has been the most studied. What does the research tell us about the success of that great experiment? In truth not very much because after 1995 the State of Wisconsin ironically embargoed and or suspended progress reports on students’ performance due to fears of religious entanglements.  From the outset Catholic Schools declined to share their students’ progress. Voucher student reports only ever included about 8% of the public school students eligible and well below the 15% cap permitted in the legislation. Therefore, we have little to no specific data as to its effectiveness. Research on student achievement can best be characterized by stating that it is inconclusive: The Witte study found no significant improvement in math while Rouse and Greene found improvement. Green found significant improvement in reading while Rouse and Witte did not.  

The next grand experiment occurred in Cleveland in 1995.
The Cleveland experiment at one point included about 7% of the eligible public school students. This current year’s data clearly demonstrates that Cleveland’s public school student’s do as well as or better than their publicly funded voucher program students. A similar set of data results as found in the Stanford University study of Charter Schools. In grades 3 to 8 Cleveland’s public school students had on average 56% of its students perform at the proficient level while their counterparts in voucher programs had 49% score in the proficient range. The data is even more compelling in math with public school students having 42% on average proficient while their counterparts in voucher programs had 27% proficiency average.

Ohio hired Indiana University researchers to sample and analyzes Cleveland voucher students' academic data from 1998 through 2004. The work evaluated the performance of 4,000 students in 100 schools.
The study, which followed individual students over time, found that when researchers controlled factors such as minority status and prior academic records, there was no significant variation in achievement.

 “The study found no significant differences in achievement between the two groups at the end of the first year. By the end of the second year, the study found positive effects in language and science for voucher students on average. But according to this study, voucher students in new private schools performed significantly less well by the end of the second year than either the public school group or voucher students in pre-existing private schools. Students who left the voucher program after a year also performed less well than those who stayed.”

 The program in Florida was the first state-wide initiative. The Florida program requires students receiving vouchers to take state assessments but the rest of the population of the schools they attend are not required to do so. As was the situation in Cleveland; Florida had its Voucher Program declared unconstitutional in 2000! Florida has commissioned The Universities of Florida and Princeton, as well as the Urban Institute to complete research on student achievement. The research data is best characterized in the report done by the Center for Educational Policy when it states:

Publicly funded voucher programs in the U.S. have been subject to surprisingly little research compared with the attention they have attracted.

Much has been made about the relatively few studies of publicly funded programs. A lack of cooperation among people on different sides of the issue has probably inhibited researchers from undertaking other studies. There is a need for additional high-quality research.

 What do we know for certain about publicly funded voucher programs?

Data supports improvement in student performance in Public Voucher Programs when it is directly linked to small class size and major parent participation and involvement in their child’s education. How ironic, when public school teachers speak of these two issues it is perceived as them scape-goating or justifying their own poor performance.

 In order to account for improvement in performance, voucher programs permit statistical considerations for minority status and socio-economic background as well as prior academic performance {something public schools are never permitted to do. we count them all}.

Parents who choose publicly funded voucher alternatives do so for reasons of safety and security. Ironic, did public school teachers and administrators make the laws that make it so difficult to discipline unruly students? No! Was it they who allowed private schools to dismiss unruly students much more readily. No!

 Research reports on Student performance success indicators have centered almost exclusively in large urban centers.

Audits of publicly funded voucher programs have shown record keeping, compliance, overpayments, and reporting problems.

Attrition rates range from 44% to 23% depending on the years enrolled in the program. Ironic again in that how will Public, non-Public and Private schools be able to efficiently plan for budget, programming, curricular ,transportation and staffing needs with this kind of fluctuating enrollments! How is this increased efficiency?

Consistent and accurate data collection and reporting has been a major problem.

Another unanswered question is how publicly funded voucher programs impact racial segregation and social stratification.

Publicly funded voucher programs do not and are not designed to save taxpayer monies. In Milwaukee there was not significant change in educational dollars. It was directly related to a significant tax increase passed on to all taxpayers prior to the voucher programs implementation. Thus taxpayers paid more. In some cases local districts paid an additional 0.06 % of their tax base to funding public voucher programs!

I cannot honestly be opposed to vouchers, charter schools and or any other such type of reforms and still be true to myself. I am simply saying that before we head into another piecemeal fix to our Educational System let us get the real performance data before we spend billions of taxpayer dollars!

I am in favor of taking the public school system down to its boot straps and rebuilding it anew without creating another bureaucratic program.

Why not allow public schools to opt out of the numerous ineffective mandates and laws that are strangling them in their efforts to reform! Strip the old model down to its bare bones and rebuild it from the wheels up and not just another paint job on an old and outdated structure! This public education system has been the very foundation of this great Democracy and Nation! It simply needs to be completely overhauled so the new and great ideas and changes don’t disappear and become invisible!

If you think I am blaming one party over the other you are sadly mistaken.  They are equally responsible and we allow it! Democracy, by definition, only works when those governed are active, knowledgeable participants in the process of governance. That does not mean watching or listening to the current diatribes of the figure head networks or cable news programs mouth pieces! They are about entertainment and generating market share and nothing more!

In the interest of full disclosure; I myself am a product of a Catholic school education. I recently discussed these topics with one of my sisters who currently has five grandchildren attending Catholic schools. She asked me what I thought of vouchers for Catholic school students. She was herself not sure if this was appropriate.  I do not believe that my family’s decision to send me to Catholic school should come at the expense of the State. In my limited knowledge of the law I see it as a clear violation of the “Separate of Church and State Clause of our Constitution” despite the Supreme Court’s 5-4 2002 ruling in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris. I know the argument that Catholic families give.  I pay taxes toward the funding of public education and receive no tangible direct benefit for my monies. Acknowledged!

 However, I know many people who rent and pay little to nothing toward the cost of their children’s public education.  I also know many people who have paid into the un-employment trust fund and have never received any funds from that program. Our system of Social Security is built on the same principles and would be just fine if our elected officials had not robbed the trust in order to pay for their respective pet projects and then announce to us all that they provided those initiatives without raising taxes!  What a distortion! I also know many folks who buy lottery tickets in the hopes of striking it rich despite the ridiculous odds against winning so that the state and local government can provide services to our elderly!

The point simply is that our nation has been governed by the principle that we all kick in to benefit those amongst us who are less fortunate!