Charter schools should get equal treatment
Governor Corbett’s administration has asked for special standards to be used to measure performance of charter schools compared to Pennsylvania public school performance.
The standards are constructed to make the charter schools appear to be performing better than they actually are, while a different standard is used to measure public schools.
Even though the federal government has not approved this special charter performance standard, the Pennsylvania Department of Education is using the standard anyway, and the results are predictable. Using the new inflated standard in Pennsylvania, about 59 percent of charters now meet a minimum federal benchmark known as “adequate yearly progress” or AYP. Without the changed performance standard, however, only 37 percent of those charters would have made the AYP benchmark, as compared to 50 percent of public schools overall.
Critics say that the new, unapproved performance standard is just another example of how the administration and some in the legislature will do anything to advance the very profitable and unregulated charter school industry which coincidentally provides millions in campaign contributions to supportive elected officials around the state.
The connection, for example, between the Koch family-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the aggressive national right-wing charter school and for-profit education lobby, and dozens of supportive Pennsylvania Republican legislators has been well established.
Just last June the legislature adopted a change in the teacher evaluation law intentionally exempting taxpayer-funded charter school teachers from the same standards used for taxpayer-funded public schools. About 30 percent of charter school teachers need not even be certified to teach in Pennsylvania, while all teachers in school district-run schools are required to be certified.
Charter school teachers are evaluated with lower standards than all other taxpayer-funded teachers in Pennsylvania, and now state education officials artificially inflate the performance of the children they teach by applying industry-developed, federally unauthorized AYP performance standards.
Unexplained irrational attempts like these to justify the outsourcing of taxpayer funds to for-profit organizations caused the conservative right to join the moderate center in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives last month to shut down “charter reform” legislation until it can be more openly and publicly addressed in the coming session in January.
All of these issues will be revisited in the coming legislative session, but it is important for the average taxpayer, parent and citizen to understand the private sector, for-profit dynamic that is driving the transfer of education funding from the public treasury to private wealth in the Pennsylvania political and legislative process.
Hundreds of millions of Pennsylvania taxpayer funds are being siphoned out of the public education system annually to pay for unregulated, non-transparent, education experimentation that is producing huge profit for privateers and political contributors, while producing overall poor performance outcomes for the children of Pennsylvania.
Alicia Dixon is the executive director for Citizens Alliance for a Better Future, which engages taxpayers in a meaningful discussion regarding the decisions being made by our elected officials that will impact all of us for years to come.