Pennsylvania’s state auditor said not long ago that the state has the worst charter legislation in the nation.
It is about to get worse if HB97 passes. Public school advocates at the Keystone State Education Coalition say the bill is in trouble and can be defeated. If you live in Pennsylvania, get on the phone at once and contact your legislator.
EdVotersPA: PA House Poised to Ram Through Horrible Charter Bill
Education Voters PA
We need your help to stop HB 97…
We had hoped that the PA House would work toward charter reform that would protect taxpayers and students and improve PA’s system of public education.
Our hopes were misplaced.
On Tuesday this week, members of the House Education Committee passed HB 97 out of committee on a vote of 17 to 10. Before they voted, lawmakers were assured that HB 97 was a work in progress and would be amended to address many significant problems and deficiencies in the bill.
That didn’t happen.
During the House session on Wednesday, Republican leadership and most Republican lawmakers opposed nearly every substantial amendment that was introduced to fix HB 97.
Tell your state representative to oppose HB 97. The House will be in session next week and is poised to ram through HB 97 without any further improvements.
· HB 97 does not address the $100 million profit (and growing) that charters reap off students with disabilities each year from the broken special education funding system.
· HB 97 does nothing to address the continued abysmal academic performance of the state’s cyber charter schools — none of which have met the minimum proficiency standard on the state’s school performance profile.
· HB 97 creates separate performance standards by which to evaluate charter/cyber charter schools and district schools, making a comparison of education quality between the two sectors impossible. Cyber charter performance won’t look as bad if cyber charters are compared only to other charter schools, many of which are also very low-performing.
· HB 97 strips local control from school boards. If HB 97 becomes law, local school boards would be prohibited from requesting any information from charter applicants beyond the information in a state-created application form; local school boards would be subjected to the whim of charter operators to amend their charter; and local school board decisions regarding charter applications and renewals would be at the mercy of the state’s Charter Appeal Board, which would be stacked with charter school supporters.
HB 97 improves ethics and transparency standards for charters and temporarily makes very small reductions in school district payments to cyber charters. In exchange for these modest modifications to the current law, legislators are handing charter lobbyists their wish list with a bow on top.
Making charters play by similar rules as other publicly funded entities should not earn the PA legislature high praise. These are necessary and important changes to the PA legislature’s broken law that should have been made years ago.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Politicians time these big charter promotions to coincide with charter schools week.
Maybe we could set up a public schools week. That way public school students would have at least one week a year where someone in government was working on their behalf.
I know there isn’t a whole lot of interest in the unfashionable “public sector schools” but maybe we could force these public employees to put aside their preferred charter and voucher systems for one week a year and do something for children in public schools.
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Not that it matters in the echo chamber, but ed reformers have all settled on a talking point where they tell the public that vouchers mean private schools are “free”
This is, of course, not true. They’re offering a voucher to offset the cost of private schools and that voucher will be paid for out of funds that formerly went to public schools.
No part of this claim is true- vouchers don’t make every private school “free” and vouchers aren’t “free”. It really stands out for being not true in ANY way.
No matter how many times Betsy DeVos tells the public that vouchers make all private schools “free”, it isn’t true. If it’s a more expensive private school they’re not accepting a 3k voucher for tuition AND nothing is “free”. The public pays for each and every ed reform idea and scheme.
https://www.the74million.org/article/make-private-school-free-or-die-the-fight-over-esas-in-new-hampshire
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We have seen this happen in state after state. After charters open, the lobbyists keep aiming for a bigger piece of the pie. They stack the deck against public schools. They look for ways to drain public education funds and buy compliance from representatives. Once they have firmly installed themselves in the legislature, they tailor make unjust laws that harm the public schools most students attend and benefit the charter industry. Voters need to work to get these so-called representatives out of office.
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