Education reform measures moving towards final days of the year
By Eric Boehm | PA Independent
HARRISBURG — Proponents of public education reform are continuing to push a series of proposals to make teachers more accountable and to give parents a great degree of choice in where their children attend school.
But unless an agreement between the House and Senate can be reached in the next few days, the bills likely are to be left waiting until after the new year.
House Republicans met behind-closed-doors for several hours Monday afternoon to discuss the school-voucher plan passed by the state Senate last month, which would redirect the state;s per-pupil spending to allow families to chose a different school rather than the one assigned to them.
The program would be open to low-income families in schools that rank in the bottom 5 percent on standardized test scores.
State Rep. Tom Quigley, R-Montgomery, said House Republicans did not reach consensus on the school-voucher bill, but discussed the possibility of limiting the number of school participating in the program or setting a “sunset date” on the bill that would allow the General Assembly to re-examine the voucher program after five or 10 years and determine if it was worth continuing.
“It could be a five-year window and then we could re-evaluate it,” Quigley said Tuesday morning. He added that the overall dialogue was “positive” on the bill.
But state Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and the original sponsor of the voucher bill, threw cold water on that idea Tuesday afternoon, saying that a sunset date on the voucher program “makes no sense whatsoever.”
Piccola said he would be “willing to listen” if the House wanted to limit the number of schools eligible for the program, down from the current number of 144, but only to a point.
“We don’t want to pass a bill that is vouchers in name only. We want a bill that is vigorous,” Piccola said. “You can pick any number you’d like, but it has to be a meaningful number, and the lowest 5 percent picks up a dramatic number of failing schools.”
Gov. Tom Corbett said last week he wanted to see the General Assembly pass a school voucher bill before the end of the year.
