Says choice leads to competition
By Eric Boehm | PA Independent
HARRISBURG — Eugene Hickok says he feels like he has been making the same arguments for 15 years.
The former state secretary of education and U.S. deputy secretary of education under President George W. Bush said Tuesday that Pennsylvania should pursue school vouchers as a way to introduce choice into a public education system that suffers from a "compliance mentality," which discourages innovation in favor of regulation.
"Choice leads to competition, and competition is one of those touchstones to improvement, to innovation," Hickok said. "I would argue that it makes sense to have some kind of a school choice provision targeted at those lowest performing, consistently poor performing schools."
The state House Education Committee heard from Hickok on Thursday during the final hearing in a series it conducted this summer on education reform proposals. Hickok said school choice should be one part of a two-step strategy that also involves greater investment in failing public schools.
Hickok knows his way around the political complications that come with school choice. As Gov. Tom Ridge's Secretary of Education from 1995 to 2001, Hickok was instrumental in bringing vouchers to the brink of reality, but bills fell short of passing in the state House on three occasions between 1996 and 1999 — once by only a handful of votes.
From 2001 to 2004, Hickok was tapped by Bush to be deputy secretary of education and was involved in developing the policies and guidelines for the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, the major education reform package of the Bush administration, which set state-level testing standards.
Hickok acknowledged that there were "lots of flaws" with NCLB, which he said tried to strike a bargain between national policy and state-based implementation. The wide variance in state standards caused problems with implementation, he said.
"Looking back, I think Washington is not in a good position to try to govern American education. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a role to play; it has a very important role to play," he said.
Hickok praised the Obama administration for making changes to NCLB and for encouraging state's to take a more leading role.
On the voucher issue in Pennsylvania, Hickok said a major change has occurred with a new national focus on failing public schools.
“We were looking at low-income schools," Hickok said. "We didn’t know about the failing schools, because the data didn’t exist.”
The various school voucher bills being debated in the Pennsylvania statehouse this year all focus on the state’s 144 “failing schools” — those that are below standards set by the state Department of Education.
More than half — 73 out of 144 — of the state’s failing schools are in the School District of Philadelphia, where the overall graduation rate is 71 percent, well below the statewide goal of 85 percent.
Bob O’Donnell, superintendent of the State College School District in Centre County, said the focus on failing schools should attempt to determine the root cause of why the schools are failing, instead of trying to build a different education system.
“Competition isn’t going to change what we are doing for our students,” O’Donnell said. “We should be growing collaboration between districts, so we can capitalize on what works.”
The voucher plan is one of the top priorities for Republicans heading into the fall session.
State Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and one of the leading proponents of vouchers in the General Assembly, said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the bill’s passage before the end of the year.
“It’s going to be much more difficult to do in the fall, but it’s clear that the House and, to some extent, the governor’s office was not fully engaged and fully prepared to complete that process in the spring,” said Piccola in a statement this week.
After holding several lengthy hearings in the spring, Piccola said a deal on a voucher bill could not be reached with House leadership before the end of the spring budget session .
After completing six weeks of hearings on school choice and charter school reform issues, House Education Chairman Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, said the House is expected to present a new voucher plan.
“It’s not a silver bullet, and we know that, but we don’t want to waste the opportunity,” Clymer said.
Piccola’s bill would create a broad voucher program for low-income students that would expand during a four-year period to include all families who fall below 300 percent of the federal poverty line. A family of four who is below 300 percent of the federal poverty line earns about $62,000 a year.
Clymer said a new voucher plan is expected to focus on the 144 failing schools, rather than a general voucher program for the whole state.
Several school choice plans have been introduced in the state House, but none have been put up for a floor vote.
