On October 26, the Pennsylvania Senate approved Senate Bill 1, which uses taxpayer money to fund vouchers for students already enrolled in private schools. This bill, along with others, has been the cause of heated controversy.

Tuition vouchers allow for students in failing school districts the opportunity to attend higher-achieving schools by paying the tuition costs of private or religious institutions. With the passage of Senate Bill 1, more taxpayer money will fund vouchers for students who already attend private and religious schools, instead of students who need the vouchers to leave a failing public school.

Some feel that this new bill will be detrimental to the improvement of education. Baruch Kintisch, Director of Policy Advocacy for the Education Law Center, argued that the new legislation is a “giveaway of public, taxpayer dollars to private and religious institutions, not a serious effort to help improve public schools or improve real opportunities to learn for our public school students.”

Furthermore, according to the National Education Policy Center, there is “no clear, positive impact on student academic achievement” for pupils who used money from publicly funded voucher programs to transfer to private schools.
“There’s no immediate impact on Lower Merion in terms of vouchers,” said LM Superintendent Dr. Christopher McGinley. “The bill… would affect schools that are failing, and our schools are very successful. [Also], the cost of going to school in Lower Merion is more than twice what the voucher bill would fund.”

Teacher evaluation has also been a hot topic over the last few months. Many states have begun implementing programs that evaluate teachers based on their students’ standardized test score performance. Supporters of this type of policy feel that it would be necessary for weeding out subpar teachers, while critics argue that it forces teachers to “teach to the test” and that standardized tests were not designed to evaluate teacher performance.

Several other policies, including the use of uniform curriculum standards and altered rules for teacher certification are also working their way into state education programs. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top Initiative encourages states to adopt these new policies by offering the states grant money once the new policies are implemented.

Many school districts are also unhappy with the way that charter schools are being funded. As a result of new legislation, school districts lost a total of $224 million dollars in state payments that compensated for their charter-school costs. Meanwhile, the new education budget passed August has led to significant cuts in state aid to public schools in Pennsylvania, and has hit poorer school districts especially hard.

McGinley said, “I try to make sure our local elected officials are informed from our perspective, but there’s nothing immediate in either the charter school bill or the voucher bill that would affect Lower Merion in the short run.”