Friday, September 30, 2011
School Choice Advocate
2011’s New School Choice Programs
So far, 13 states have helped make 2011 the “Year of Growth for School Choice.” This fall, the central front in the fight for educational opportunity will be along the banks of the Susquehanna River, in Pennsylvania’s state capital of Harrisburg.
In the spring, even as choice advocates won big in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and other places, the Keystone State played host to a stalemate. Despite support from Gov. Tom Corbett and key legislators in both chambers — including members of both the Republican and Democratic leadership in the Senate — school choice legislation languished in committee as a bitter fight raged over how to close a multi-billion-dollar budget gap.
Now, as legislators prepare to return to the dome, Gov. Corbett has pledged that school choice is his number-one priority, and a host of advocates have refused to accept anything less than victory. These include the REACH Foundation and other organizations that staged vigorous rallies under the dome, and the Commonwealth Foundation, which recently exposed the shocking facts about Pennsylvania schools that aren’t just failing, but violent.
Indeed, as our friends at the Commonwealth Foundation showed in their mini-documentary LIFELINE, in the most recent year for which data are available, Pennsylvania’s 144 lowestperforming schools reported 5,430 violent incidents — including 1,983 total assaults statewide, seven rapes in Philadelphia’s 73 failing schools, 14 illegal weapons charges at Hannah Penn Middle School in York, 33 incidents of criminal trespassing at William Allen High School in Allentown, and 36 instances of vandalism at South Philadelphia High School. LIFELINE aired on statewide television in June and reignited the fight for choice.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Commonwealth Foundation and its allies have shined some much-needed light on the unacceptable reality of life in Pennsylvania’s violent, failing schools — and policymakers are responding.
