One State's Poor Excuse for Funneling Taxpayer Cash to Private Schools

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/one-states-poor-excuse-funneling-taxpayer-cash-private-schools



It’s politically hot right now to talk about “failing” schools. To hear many legislators and school “reformers” tell the story, public education in the U.S. is circling the drain. Did you see Michelle Rhee’s obnoxious Olympic spoof ad ? Remember the nasty radio campaign back in June, funded by the ultra-conservative and mega-rich Koch brothers, pushing the narrative of “students trapped in failing schools”? [See “ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly .”] But the rhetoric of failure is not only misleading (and sometimes flat-out wrong), it is having disastrous consequences on our schools.

The latest example of this comes courtesy of Pennsylvania’s recently expanded EITC $150 million corporate tax giveaway. The horribly misnamed Educational Improvement Tax Credit program now has a companion called the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit program, which is premised on the notion that our public schools are failures and that students must be rescued from them. To do this, the program borrows from the federal government’s No Child Left Behind, which has been labeling schools as failures for the past decade under one of the nation’s largest policy fiascos. Through the new EITC program, Pennsylvania has developed a list of 415 “failing schools” and created a voucher-like system allowing students living near them to take public taxpayer money to go to private schools. (Students can also go to another public school in a different district, if they will accept them – more on that later.)

But the whole system rests on faulty logic. First, the list of supposedly “low-achieving” schools is deeply flawed. Published at the end of July by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the list uses results from the 2010-2011 PSSAs (standardized state tests given to all public school students in grades 3 – 8 and 11) to identify the bottom 15% of schools based on reading and math scores. However, as a recent analysis by the Pennsylvania School Board Association shows, a full third of the schools on that list actually reached their student achievement targets set by the state and federal government.