Defunding the public sphere

By Dave Anderson:

Gov. Corbett (R-PA) wants to gut public education and transfer resources from evaluated public schools to non-evaluated private schools.  He'll get most if not all of what he wants as he is working with a Republican trifecta in Harrisburg. 

The Allentown Morning Call has, as it normally does, some of the best state policy analysis on the proposed FY 2012 budget:

Gov. Tom Corbett is proposing to roll back public school education spending by 8.8 percent and gut higher education funding by more than 50 percent while calling for caps on school taxes, the elimination of some teacher salary perks and installing a statewide pay freeze for all public school employees, according to his first budget since winning election in November....

The basic education funding essentially ends former Gov. Ed Rendell's and the Legislature's six-year push through the so-called costing-out study to add more money to the coffers of poor districts with weak inventories of local real estate taxes.

Corbett's proposed $5.2 billion basic education funding would supplant the costing-out study, which began in 2008-09, with a voucher program that would give either tax money to families or tax credits to businesses to help finance the education of children at private and parochial schools.

One of the primary means of transferring revenue and resources from the public sphere to the private sphere is a proposed expanation of the Educational Improvement Tax Credit.  The EITC is a tax forgiveness program that allows corporations to get a 3:4 or a 9:10 direct write-off on their Pennsylvania taxes if they instead donate money to approved educational and scholarship organizations.  Private schools count as approved organizations as long as they get the proper paperwork into the Department of Community and Economic Development on time.

The big problem with the EITC from an accountability stand-point is that there is minimal accountability. The recipients must show that they have basic financial controls in place, basic counts and basic organizational information.  However there is no requirement that recipient organizations understake any performance evaluation.  There is no requirement that a recipient organization adminster any type of nationally validated testing that public schools are required under No Child Left Behind or to use evidence based curricuuluum or anything else. 

EITC is a slush fund for private and/or religious schools with far fewer strings attached to those dollars than any public school.  And it is the epitome of Republican policy making right now as it weakens the public sphere, transfers resources from the secular to the religious and has no accountability all wrapped up in the rhetoric of choice and the virtue of the market.