Cut+Education,+Cut+Growth

Reducing state education funding is ill advised for countless reasons. But one should stop our governor and like-minded legislators in their tracks.
==Gov. Tom Corbett's unprecedented $1 billion-plus in proposed cuts is radically at odds with his pro-business, job-creation agenda. Our public schools, after all, are the wellspring of our state's workforce.==

Whether Mr. Corbett's policies and fiscal prescriptions ultimately generate jobs, they'll do nothing to address known problems in filling them.
==As the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board reported last year, an estimated 30,000 jobs in Western Pennsylvania already go begging, largely because of deficiencies in educational attainment and skills among our pool of potential applicants.== ==Business leaders have long bemoaned this mismatch. Through years of flagging standardized test scores, they blamed our classrooms. As most of them now know, I hope, the past several years have brought a robust response from our schools that markedly improves the outlook for the upcoming generation of workers and the business community.== ==More than three-quarters of Pennsylvania's students achieved proficiency in math in the last school year, up from 57.6 percent in 2005; and nearly three-quarters achieved proficiency in reading, up from 65.6 percent over the same time period. In fact, scores on the latest Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests rose for all grade levels and at all levels of achievement. The national Center on Education Policy lauded the advances as a singular accomplishment, citing Pennsylvania in 2009 as "the only state with rising test scores across the board."==

Not surprisingly, the gains coincided with increases in state support as well as a change that apportioned the state's basic education subsidies to help level the playing field for poorer districts.
==It would be tragic to withdraw resources that our schools have put toward so much progress when there's still so much more progress needed. Few districts can hold onto these gains, much less push further ahead, without the funding that Mr. Corbett plans to eliminate. Many, particularly in poorer communities, would fall backward.== ==The proposed budget not only would cut $550 million in basic education subsidies, it would erase funding that was strategically targeted to improve academic performance and overturn efforts that helped establish greater equity for poorer districts.== ==For example, the $259 million in accountability block grants that the budget would cut strengthened early childhood education with more pre-school and full-day kindergarten programs; supported implementation of evidence-based programs aimed directly at raising student achievement in core subjects; and provided math and literacy coaching.== ==The governor's budget also would cancel $48 million in funding for the education assistance program, which expanded the availability of after-school tutoring for students scoring below proficient on PSSAs, and would wipe out $224 million in reimbursements that helped districts make up at least a fraction of the revenue they've lost to charter schools.== ==Despite Mr. Corbett's pledge against state tax increases, the cuts he proposes in education inevitably would trigger local tax increases, reductions in programming, and, in many districts, both. Most worrisome is that, for our poorest districts, program cuts seem the only viable option.== ==According to an analysis published in the Post-Gazette March 11, the cuts would fall disproportionately on districts such as Duquesne City, Steel Valley, Sto-Rox and Wilkinsburg, whose distressed communities long have suffered under a state education funding system that's unfairly and irrationally dependent on property taxes.== ==Poor districts simply don't have adequate property value to tax. And that shouldn't deny the young people in these communities access to the same "thorough" public education that Pennsylvania's constitution guarantees all children.==

Our public schools remain their clearest path to brighter futures. For them, for our region and our state, public education is the greatest driver of economic opportunity.
==//Linda L. Croushore, Ed.D, is executive director of The Consortium for Public Education, a nonprofit organization based in McKeesport (www.theconsortiumforpubliceducation.org).//==

== Read more: [] ==

=Issues in Education=

= = =News= =home = = =