Chalkbeat

Senate Education committee revives school voucher program at center of last year’s budget fight

2024-05-07T20:13:40+00:00

This story was originally published by The Pennsylvania Capital-Star

A bill reviving the school voucher program killed by House Democrats during last year’s budget debates passed the Senate Education committee with bipartisan support on Tuesday. The program, called the PASS scholarship, would allow most students in the state’s lowest-performing school districts up to $10,000 to spend towards private schools.

The PASS program was initially supported by Gov. Josh Shapiro during partisan debates over the state budget last year, but House Democrats opposed it. While the version of the budget that passed the Senate included funding for the voucher program, House Democrats refused to pass it unless Shapiro agreed to veto the item. Ultimately, that’s what happened.

The Senate Education committee’s move Tuesday is almost certain to revive that fight.

Public school advocates have long opposed school vouchers, saying the money would be better spent shoring up the state’s public schools, especially in light of the recent court ruling that found the state’s public schools were unconstitutionally underfunded.

“Pennsylvania’s system of public school funding is so inequitable that the Commonwealth Court ruled it violates the state constitution,” said Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin. “Instead of sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools, we should focus on the public schools that educate 90% of Pennsylvania’s students.”

Proponents of the program note that, unlike school voucher programs in other states, the PASS scholarship would not take money from public schools that recipients would have otherwise attended.

Sen. Anthony Williams (D-Philadelphia), the only Democrat on the committee to vote in favor of the legislation, noted he also supports vastly increasing public school funding. But he also expressed skepticism that any amount of money could help the students stuck in the state’s worst-performing public schools.

“You cannot look past the obvious,” Williams said. “There are parts of Pennsylvania, rural and urban, that are not being served by the public experience and the billions of dollars that we may or may not send to them will not fix that. We cannot find teachers.”

Committee Democrats and Republicans alike acknowledged that the bill being put forward essentially amounted to the start of a battle over what to include in this year’s budget.

“I’m not in the room when the budget deal gets negotiated behind closed doors,” said Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny), the minority chair of the committee and a staunch opponent of sending state funds to non-public schools. “There is no trade for vouchers.”

Asked whether Shapiro still supports the program, a spokesperson pointed to his budget address earlier this year.

Shapiro said during the address that he still supports some form of voucher funding for students in underperforming school districts to spend towards “extra tutoring, books and computers, or yes, going to another school.”

Shapiro added, “the Senate passed a proposal last year that included important elements of that, and it’s something I support and consider to be unfinished business.”

The 2025 budget must be passed by both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House before being signed by Shapiro.

Latino-led charter schools attract Philadelphia families with tight-knit communities and Spanish

2024-03-22T17:23:43+00:00

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All four of Margarita Albino’s children have passed through the halls of Pan American Academy Charter School.

The Northeast Philadelphia resident, who is Dominican, was drawn to the school by its dual language program. Although Albino is bilingual, she says she feels more comfortable with Pan American’s staff, which is made up of predominantly Spanish-speaking Latinos.

“The school knows that it’s needed to keep [the heritage] alive in them,” she said, adding later, “They have no problem assisting me in Spanish.”

Latino families in Philadelphia say they’re choosing charter schools operated by Latino-led nonprofit organizations because the schools are able to fill gaps not filled by the school district. Several Spanish-speaking parents and caregivers told Chalkbeat that Latino-led charter schools are providing more cultural representation, language accessibility, and a tighter-knit community than their traditional neighborhood public schools.

The Latino population in Philadelphia has almost tripled since the year 2000, reaching about 16% of the city’s residents in 2020, according to the census.

Additionally, about a quarter of the roughly 197,100 students in the Philadelphia school district identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to district data. And in the 2022-23 school year, the district reported 17% of students were English learners, a 9% jump from the 2014-15 school year. Almost half of English learners came from Spanish-speaking homes.

Though the majority of Hispanic students in Philadelphia are enrolled in traditional district schools, Hispanic students comprise 18% of total charter school enrollment, according to a report by advocacy group Children First. The group also notes Hispanic students make up the largest number of Philadelphia-based cyber charter students with 1,478 students, or 80% of total cyber charter students in 2023.

In the 1970s, Philadelphia public schools were trailblazers for bilingual education. The district oversaw a pilot program for English as a second language and a Bilingual Institute to train and recruit teachers. It also opened a bilingual school, as well as bilingual programs that reached about half of the burgeoning Puerto Rican student population.

But the programs’ budget, which was supported by federal funding, eventually dwindled. Today, just eight out of 218 district schools offer Spanish-English dual language programs.

There’s also the issue of staff representation and educators’ ability to connect to Latino families. Only 4.4% of teachers in the district are Hispanic, according to a 2022 Research for Action report. A lack of bilingual and culturally competent staff can weaken parent-teacher communication and impact students’ academic success, according to research.

The school district said it’s aware of these gaps and is working to address them by hiring more Spanish speaking bilingual counseling assistants and teachers.

Nathalie Nérée, the district’s head of special education and diverse learners, said there are plans to implement another dual language program in a public school. But she said the district would need more resources and community support, since dual language programs are “costly.”

Diana Garcia, principal of district-run Willard Elementary School in Kensington, said there have been several families that have left her school for Pan American Academy Charter School, which is in Fairhill and is run by Congreso de Latinos Unidos. Thirty-five students whose designated local public school is Willard attend Pan American, according to district data.

Garcia said one reason for this is the convenience of having their children across grade levels attend the same school. But she also said “there is more work to be done” when it comes to district staffing. She said she hired at least eight more staff members to accommodate Spanish speakers at Willard after becoming principal.

“If this school who has a 45% Latino population doesn’t have Latino representation to service those families, then we’re failing them,” she said.

‘You were encouraged to celebrate your child’s success’

There are at least four Latino-led charters in Philadelphia that advertise having a sizable number of Spanish-speaking teachers, as well as dual language programs for students.

The district’s recent enrollment data shows that 91% of students at Esperanza Academy and 84% of students at Pan American identify as Hispanic or Latino. At Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School in Olney run by ASPIRA Inc. of Pennsylvania, 86% of students identify as Hispanic/Latino.

Although the Latino-led charter schools embrace the Spanish language, they do not guarantee if any staff speak Portuguese, which is spoken by Brazilians, or indigenous Latin American languages like Qʼeqchi’ spoken by some Guatemalans; there has been an influx of these groups in recent years.

Glenda Marrero, principal of Hostos Charter School, says that parents are more involved when there’s faculty who speak the same language.

“They tend to come to more activities because they know they’re not going to miss out,” she said. “There’s nothing like sitting in a room and not understanding nothing, but people are clapping around you.”

Cesar Ríos, a bilingual guidance counselor for students in grades 4-8 at Hostos Charter School, said that he witnesses more “parental and familial engagement” at the school.

He said one example of the school’s work with Latino families involves helping undocumented children or family members who need academic or other support.

He also said not all Latino students come from Spanish-speaking families, and that Hostos prioritizes teaching students about Latino “cultural heroes that might not otherwise be addressed let alone highlighted at another school.”

Farrell Elementary school teacher Angelee Rivera said her daughter transferred to Esperanza Cyber Charter School for her junior year of high school.

Rivera, who is Puerto Rican, said she felt the charter school, which is run by the local Hispanic-focused nonprofit Esperanza, embraced the Latino community. She was especially touched by remarks made by the CEO of Esperanza, the Rev. Luis Cortés, Jr., who is Latino, at her daughter’s graduation.

Cortés Jr. encouraged families to “turn up” and loudly celebrate their students’ achievements: “‘Our kids, they go through so much in their life just for being Black and brown and they survived the pandemic. … When your child’s name is called I want you to show out!’”

Rivera said Cortés Jr.’s words reminded her of an incident at the Philadelphia High School for Girls that occurred around the same time as her daughter’s graduation. Officials at Girls High withheld some students’ diplomas during the graduation ceremony because their families cheered loudly as their names were called.

“You have a school like Girls High, if you dance across the stage to show that you’re proud of yourself, you’re kind of punished,” Rivera said. “And yet in a school that is about community and is about the Latino community specifically, you were encouraged to celebrate your child’s success.”

Philadelphia’s ‘Renaissance’ charter schools did not produce what was promised

2024-02-28T12:30:00+00:00

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On the first day of classes last September, the Philadelphia school superintendent and mayor joined other officials outside of Guion S. Bluford Elementary School to cheer on its 539 students as they entered the building.

The school district’s choice of Bluford for this annual ritual was telling. From 2010 to 2022, Bluford — built in 1972 to serve a growing population in the Overbrook neighborhood — had not been run by the district, but as a charter school operated by Universal Companies as part of the district’s Renaissance Initiative.

Then in the summer of 2022, in a dispute with its board of trustees, Universal ended its contract, and for that academic year the school operated in turmoil. Without its longtime manager, Bluford struggled to hire teachers, convince parents of its viability, and keep up the facility — among other problems, it lost internet access — until the district stepped in to build a new staff and assign a turnaround principal in 2023.

Bluford was part of one of the most sweeping education policy shifts ever undertaken in Philadelphia. The Renaissance Initiative — launched in 2010 under Superintendent Arlene Ackerman while the district was under state control for poor performance — strove to turn around about 10% of Philadelphia’s low-performing district schools by ceding them to charter organizations that promised to do better.

“We will transform historically failing schools and embrace bold new educational approaches with proven track records of success that can transform schools,” Ackerman wrote of the Renaissance initiative in her ambitious reform plan for the district.

At the height of the Renaissance Initiative, 22 former district schools were controlled by charter operators. But district leadership has quietly moved away from the model. Over the past seven years, four schools, including Bluford, have been returned to the district. One, Daroff Charter School, closed entirely. Now 17 schools are part of the initiative — and no new schools have been added since 2016.

“The goal was to prove that charters would work with any kid, not just about parents who were highly motivated to enter a lottery, and to show that a neighborhood school turned over to a charter organization would do better than if run by the school district,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, an advocacy group.

“As far as I can tell, the data didn’t result in that.”

In fact, a Chalkbeat analysis has found that the dramatic turnaround promises of the Renaissance program never materialized.

Some schools made incremental progress over the years that slightly outpaced the district as a whole, but the group of schools overall has not seen meteoric success.

Indeed, in 2023 the Renaissance charter schools as a group mostly performed worse in standardized tests for elementary and middle schoolers than the district averages, the analysis showed. And compared to district schools, a lower share of Renaissance charters exceeded those averages.

“It was a bad idea poorly implemented,” said Chris McGinley, who served on both the School Reform Commission that oversaw the district while it was under state control and the Board of Education, which won back control of the district in 2018.

The program could be under greater scrutiny as Mayor Cherelle Parker takes office. Parker has had a mixed message on charters, continually emphasizing that she would not stand for people pitting district-run and charter schools against each other.

But she hasn’t said whether she would like to see growth of the charter sector, which already educates about a third of the nearly 200,000 students in the city’s publicly funded schools. And she has not yet named new school board members, who could decide the fate of the Renaissance program itself and its remaining charters.

Parker’s 50-member education policy subcommittee includes the CEOs of four of the seven organizations that run Renaissance charters, three of which operate schools that were recommended for nonrenewal due to subpar academic performance while the fourth was denied a new charter application based on the record of its existing schools.

Her appointees to the Mayor’s Office on Education, Sharon Ward, an activist and former state official, and Debora Carrera, a former district principal assistant superintendent, declined comment and couldn’t be reached, respectively.

Superintendent Tony Watlington declined to comment on the program.

Peng Chao, head of the board’s Office of Charter Schools, which evaluates existing charters and vets new applications, said that the outcomes for the Renaissance schools “have been mixed.”

“With a sector of over 20 schools over the course of more than a decade, it isn’t surprising that some schools have excelled in certain areas and others have struggled. Every school, Renaissance or not, has a different arc,” said Chao.

Betting on a school turnaround model

Turning district schools over to charters has been a go-to turnaround method in major urban districts for more than two decades. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took over the New Orleans schools, shut down all but a few that were high performing, and created a Recovery School District that was essentially a system of charters. Chicago had its own Renaissance schools initiative that leaders are rethinking.

In Philadelphia, the movement flourished when the district was under state control and coincided with a push in Pennsylvania to expand the charter sector. Even before the official start of the Renaissance program, under the influence of prevailing Pennsylvania politics at the time, other district schools had become charters.

Charter expansion has long been the favored school reform strategy of Pennsylvania’s Republican governors and legislators as they resisted more spending on education and sought to weaken unions, even though the state had the widest gaps in the nation between high-wealth and low-wealth districts. Only last year did a Commonwealth Court judge rule the funding system unconstitutional.

Ackerman was betting her career on the success of Renaissance schools. She told Pew Charitable Trusts in 2010, “If I can show [parents] what the other side of the rainbow looks like, I don’t care who comes in after me. They are going to force the new superintendent and the new administration to give them what their children deserve.”

Ackerman’s vision for the Renaissance program included two models designed to offer “greater autonomy in exchange for increased accountability,” according to her 2009 reform blueprint for the district, Imagine 2014. Implicit in the entire initiative was to set up a competition to determine which turnaround strategy was more effective — more internal resources and a staff shakeup, or charter conversion. The schools that remained under district control were given more resources and called “Promise Academies,” while those that were handed over to charter organizations were dubbed “Renaissance” charter schools.

“Arlene was very strong on the idea that these programs would run in parallel with a lot of ability to compare the results from the programs,” said former School Reform Commission member Joseph Dworetzky. “I thought it was an interesting idea.” Dworetzky also said the board considered this more efficient and a way to stem the spiraling costs to the district of charter proliferation.

The Renaissance charters had defined catchment areas like traditional district schools, but otherwise operated independent of the district, the same as any other charter school.

At first, things seemed to be going well. An 18-month interim report found “The Year One outcomes for schools in the Renaissance Schools Initiative suggest that something positive is happening.” In 2014, Renaissance charters were doing a successful job keeping students enrolled for the entire school year, another report found.

But under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, cuts to education spending between 2010 and 2014 put a strain on the entire system. The belt tightening effectively ended the Promise Academy experiment by stripping the schools of extra programs and supports. The Renaissance charters were impacted because, as the district’s budget decreased, their per pupil payments went down.

In 2011, Ackerman resigned.

Her successor, William Hite, continued the Renaissance conversions, but decided to let parents vote, first on who the new operator should be and then whether there should be a conversion at all. This caused conflict, especially at Wister Elementary School in Germantown, where Hite had second thoughts about his initial recommendation. During the 2016 debate over whether the school should become a charter, parents were bitterly split, and the School Reform Commission overruled Hite to approve the turnover.

After that, Renaissance conversions ceased.

In March of 2020, as McGinley was preparing to leave the school board, which by then had resumed control of the district, he proposed a resolution to formally end the Renaissance program altogether — but that resolution was quietly removed from the meeting agenda and never resurfaced.

How Renaissance schools measure up

Determining the impact of the turnarounds is challenging in Philadelphia, since two major events have occurred since the program started in 2011 — a revision of standardized tests in 2015, limiting the ability for apples to apples score comparisons, and the educational upheaval of the pandemic.

But looking at results, most of the Renaissance charter schools do not show high rates of proficiency. According to the Chalkbeat analysis, these schools started out well below district and state averages in English Language Arts and math performance — that’s why they were targeted for this intervention.

The analysis, though, shows that none of the schools are performing particularly well today. For instance, a majority of the Renaissance charters saw less than 10% of students score at or above proficiency on math tests in 2023. By some metrics, a few made incremental progress over the years.

Several schools, including Harrity Elementary and Mann Elementary, operated by Mastery, showed spikes in indicators including test scores for the first several years, said Chao, head of the board’s Office of Charter Schools.

But, he added, “Sustained improvement in student achievement, however, has not been as evident or consistent.”

The saga of Memphis Street Academy@JPJones in Frankford is telling. Once a junior high school with a reputation for out-of-control discipline and general disarray, it is now run as a Renaissance charter for 5th through 8th grades by American Paradigm schools. In contrast to its past, it is calm and orderly, with a solid teaching staff and lots of student activities.

But its achievement scores have remained persistently low — math proficiency is at 1%, and the Board of Education has voted not to renew the five-year charter signed in 2017.

American Paradigm has since sued the district in federal court saying the performance standards they agreed to, based on absolute achievement rather than growth in student scores, are unfair. The school can remain open during the appeals process.

Hite, who was superintendent between 2012 and 2022 and presided over the creation of five Renaissance charters, in hindsight questioned the effectiveness of the initiative.

“What I recall is that they saw climate and culture indicators improve, and in some cases saw growth improve, particularly [in a reduction of] children who scored below basic,” Hite said in an interview. “But we really didn’t see marked improvement in achievement.”

Hite attributed this to the myriad factors besides school quality that affect student outcomes, including the impact of poverty, violence, and the lack of essential services.

“This stuff takes time,” he said.

Bluford and Daroff were not the only schools that exited Renaissance. Two other district schools that became Renaissance charters, Olney High and its feeder Stetson Middle, were also taken back by the district due to both lagging performance and financial problems within Aspira, Inc., to which they had been turned over.

Michael Roth, now Olney’s principal, worked in the school under both models. He is not a fan of charter conversion as a school reform strategy.

“I think it’s offensive,” he said. “A lot of these measures were experimenting with communities of color. I’m not saying some good things didn’t come out of it, but my thought is, why don’t we properly fund the public schools and make sure they have the resources they need and do it right without switching back and forth?”

Tangela McClam, Principal of Bluford Charter School, left, greets students on the first day of school.

Renaissance supporters say look beyond test scores

Scott Gordon, the founder and longtime executive director of Mastery Charter, deems the initiative a success, saying that the Renaissance program brought numerous improvements to schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, even if test scores did not dramatically rise. Mastery has run nine Renaissance charters, and essentially built its brand around the program.

Chalkbeat’s analysis showed that Mastery performed marginally higher on average than other Renaissance charters on the 2023 state tests, the PSSA, but still had overall scores below the district average (with one single exception on the English language arts test).

Gordon said the model showed that a different governing structure could bring more stability to neighborhood schools, improve academic outcomes while serving the same kids, and draw parents back into the building.

Before Mastery, he said, ”These were schools in a never-ending negative spiral, lots of transiency, kids with high needs. As the school struggles, parents begin leaving, it struggles more, and it goes downhill.”

‘We needed a turnaround in a turnaround’

Bluford’s history shows that the initiative both fell short of being transformational and also often sowed confusion for families.

Bluford was one of the original Renaissance charter schools. Formerly the William B. Hanna elementary school (it was renamed for astronaut and alum Guion Bluford, the first Black person in space), Bluford was turned over to Universal Companies. Like the other schools in the program, it had long suffered from poor academic performance.

But the desired turnaround never happened; in 2015, the School Reform Commission voted to revoke the charter because it did not meet its academic targets. “I was struck by the notion that we needed a turnaround in a turnaround,” commissioner Feather Houstoun said at the time. But appeals kept it open — even though the Board of Education’s own Renaissance schools policy was supposed to supersede the state’s charter authorization, evaluation, renewal and revocation process.

Then, in 2022, Universal had its falling out with the board of trustees that oversaw it, leading to its tumultuous year and the district’s decision to return it to district control.

“It was very traumatic,” said teacher Tyshea Tucker. “Everything was so sudden.”

When the upheaval occurred, Tucker had been a teaching assistant at Daroff studying for her degree. She moved to Bluford when it was still a charter, and then applied to stay when the district took over and is now a second-grade teacher.

All the disruption was even more unsettling for her students, she said, many of whom have already had to deal with trauma in their lives. The staff turnover, she feared, reinforced feelings that adults weren’t there for them. She said she had to “go the extra mile” to build relationships and trust with them.

For longtime neighborhood stalwarts like Tamara Keene, who sent two sons through Bluford, the changes have been jarring.

Keene said the school functioned well under Universal at first.

But when Universal left in 2022, along with about half the staff, the board running the school “didn’t have a lot of control. … They spent a year just holding the school down.”

The turnover split parents, some of whom wanted the school to remain a charter, while others, like Keene, wanted a traditional public school option. “I’m still upset that there was no neighborhood school that was not a charter,” she said.

This current tension between charters and traditional schools harkens back to why Ackerman launched the Renaissance experiment in the first place. Despite scant evidence that the Renaissance schools delivered the promised transformation, Ackerman had concluded at the end of her time as superintendent that dramatic educational improvement for traditionally underserved students was impossible within the existing structure of large school districts with many power centers, especially teachers unions.

And her ideas for reform are still present today.

Like Ackerman, Parker is advocating for longer school days and a longer school year, tall orders to make happen within the traditional district structure.

But if it does happen, families like Keene’s will be the ones experiencing it firsthand.

Although Keene’s children are grown, she will continue watching the transformation of Bluford from a new perch — three of her grandchildren now attend the school.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania’s budget impasse ends, but ‘Level Up’ funding gets left behind

2023-12-14T17:28:42+00:00

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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s budget impasse ended Wednesday after the divided state legislature agreed to send millions of dollars to community colleges and libraries, fund public legal defense, and create a student teacher stipend.

Three budget-enabling code bills, plus dozens of other pieces of legislation, passed with broad bipartisan support during a swirl of late-night votes and were sent to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s desk.

The flurry of action marked a sudden end to five-and-a-half months of deadlock that divided the Democratic-controlled state House and the Republican-controlled state Senate and ground the gears of government to a halt.

The budget bills create a handful of new programs, many of which had been prioritized by state House Democrats, including ones that would more than triple the size of Pennsylvania’s child care tax credit and add preventative dental care to the state’s Medicaid program.

“We are collectively showing that we can move past the partisan politics, have real conversations and get a lot done for the good people of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said Wednesday night shortly before signing the bills.

Negotiations over these parts of the budget broke down this summer after Shapiro agreed to veto $100 million for private school vouchers favored by Republicans in order to win support from state House Democrats for the main budget bill.

At the time, the Shapiro administration said it would hold off on spending about $1.1 billion until it received additional authorization from the legislature.

This week’s deal leaves out some high-profile programs lawmakers had initially agreed to in their summer agreement, which had been caught in the spending delay.

Most prominently, the popular Whole-Home Repairs Program — which provides grants to property owners who need to fund expensive maintenance projects like fixing leaky roofs — was not given the $50 million lawmakers agreed to spend earlier this year.

Other programs caught in the code bill delay — such as the stipends, indigent defense funding, and state allocations to community colleges and libraries — ultimately received funding, though the delay caused hardships. Some nonprofits that benefit from the PA Workwear program and provide clothing to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients had to lay off staff while they waited for the code fight to resolve.

Wednesday’s deal marks the conclusion of months of talks, a resolution that lawmakers in both major parties celebrated.

State House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) said she is grateful the budget is finished and looks forward to the next one, “because the good news is we’re just getting started.”

The programs that didn’t make it into the final deal, like Whole-Home Repairs, were often casualties of last-minute horse-trading rather than concerted opposition.

Despite being swamped with demand since it was created last year using federal stimulus dollars, funding for Whole-Home Repairs will “lapse” until lawmakers return to the budget negotiating table next year, state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told reporters Wednesday night.

It could make a comeback then. State Sen. David Argall (R., Schuylkill), who helped champion the proposal last year, said he supports the repair grants and is looking ahead to next year’s budget talks to restore funding.

“It just got lost in the shuffle with all of the other competing programs,” Argall told Spotlight PA.

The final deal also does not route $100 million in additional state aid to Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts, a program known as “Level Up.” Instead, the legislature reallocated those dollars to a state board to fund school construction projects. Another $75 million was allocated to remove lead, asbestos, and other toxins from schools.

State Rep. Pete Schweyer (D., Lehigh) said in a statement that the $175 million marks “the first time in nearly a decade” that “funding passed by the House will give school districts the necessary resources to make the building upgrades.”

Supporters of alternatives to public schools also got a win, as the final education code added $150 million to two related state tax credits for businesses that fund private school scholarships. But for the first time, schools will be required to report data on scholarship recipients’ grade level, disability status, and original public school district, among other data points.

Some of the new proposals that made it into the final code deal were unexpected.

One of the biggest changes, which emerged publicly late in lawmakers’ talks, was the expansion of the state tax credit created last year that allows parents to deduct child care costs from their state taxable income.

The current state credit is capped at 30% of the value of the federal credit, which means it can give caregivers a maximum of $315 annually for a single dependent under 13 or $630 for two or more children, depending on income level.

Under the new law, parents can receive a refundable tax credit equal to their federal child care deduction starting in 2024. That amount can be up to $1,050 for one dependent under 13 and $2,100 for two or more, depending on income.

Child care costs vary by location and the child’s age, but according to federal Department of Labor data, amounts can range from $6,000 to $14,000 a year for Pennsylvania families.

The deal also restarts dental care for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians receiving medical assistance. These benefits had been stripped down to only medically necessary care for adults, such as exams, X-rays, and tooth extractions, but usually excluded other surgeries like root canals.

“As the saying goes, when you smile, the whole world smiles back at you,” state Rep. Valerie Gaydos (R., Allegheny) said on the state House floor Tuesday, when the chamber passed a standalone proposal to reintroduce dental care.

The deal also increases a surcharge on phone bills to pay for 911 dispatching infrastructure. The fee will increase by 30 cents in 2024 to $1.95 before it disappears in 2026.

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania called the increase “far short of properly funding” the service.

One last budget item remains unfinished. A bill that would give $31.6 million to the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school, the commonwealth’s only such school, fell 12 votes short of the two-thirds vote needed to approve the allocation.

The bill was sunk by GOP opposition, which state House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) attributed to the school’s recent controversy. The university’s former president, Liz Magill, resigned after testifying before Congress regarding antisemitism on college campuses. Members of Congress and alumni called for Magill’s resignation after she defended allowing genocidal language on campus, saying that such language was allowed as free speech.

“Our institutions of higher education have become an unfortunate home for hate,” Cutler said.

Other unfinished business may have to wait until next year.

For instance, the final package did not contain a boost to state public transit funding through a sales tax transfer, a measure backed by both Democrats and Republicans. SEPTA had pushed for such a measure throughout the fall to avoid reducing service, citing dwindling federal stimulus dollars and low ridership.

“We have the ability to keep advocating for this transit system,” state Rep. Morgan Cephas (D., Philadelphia) and chair of the city’s delegation told Spotlight PA. “And that’s something that we’ll be focusing on in the next fiscal cycle.”

Spotlight PA’s Kate Huangpu contributed reporting.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Pennsylvania’s current child care tax credit is worth 30% of the federal credit, and that the just-passed budget code will increase its value to match 100% of that federal credit, for a maximum value of $2,100 annually.

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Pennsylvania Democrats, Shapiro cut budget deal without school voucher program

2023-07-06T01:48:04+00:00

A push by Pennsylvania Republicans and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro for a state-funded voucher program appears to be dead for now, after Shapiro said the program will not be enacted as part of the state budget.

In a statement Wednesday, the governor said he did not want to further hold up the already overdue budget. Last week, the Democratic-controlled House Rules Committee knocked down legislation that would have set up a $100 million so-called Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program.

As part of a deal with the House, which has a one-vote Democratic majority, lawmakers in that body passed the $45.5 billion budget bill with the voucher language included. Shapiro has promised to line-item veto the appropriation when it comes to his desk. Late Wednesday evening, the House voted 117 to 86 to send the bill to Shapiro.

“Without enabling legislation setting up this program, my Administration legally cannot implement it,” Shapiro said in his statement. “Knowing that the two chambers will not reach consensus at this time to enact PASS, and unwilling to hold up our entire budget process over this issue, I will line-item veto the full $100 million appropriation and it will not be part of this budget bill.”

Though the proposed voucher program will not be enacted as part of the state budget, Shapiro signaled similar proposals will continue to be brought up in the coming months as he has made clear he supports the idea of a state-backed, school-choice program.

“While I am disappointed the two parties could not come together, [House Majority] Leader [Matthew] Bradford has given me his word … that he will carefully examine and consider additional education options including PASS, Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC), and Education Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) as we work to address our public education needs in light of the Commonwealth Court’s recent education ruling,” Shapiro wrote in a statement.

In February, a Commonwealth Court judge declared Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional and ordered the General Assembly to bring it into compliance. While including some significant increases, this budget does not fundamentally overhaul the Commonwealth’s approach to education spending to provide adequate funding to all districts and make it more equitable.

Asked about vouchers, Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington said in a statement that his hope is that lawmakers will focus on adequately and equitably funding education so that Philadelphia students have the necessary resources to get “the education they deserve and need.”

The voucher program — negotiated between Shapiro and Senate Republicans — quickly became a sticking point in budget discussions. In a budget it passed on June 30, the GOP-controlled Senate revised an earlier voucher plan to make it more palatable to holdouts by adding household income limits and reporting requirements for private schools. It also got a new name: PASS, rather than the previously proposed “Lifeline Scholarship Program.”

As written, the majority of Philadelphia School District students would have been eligible under both the PASS or Lifeline versions of the voucher program. Critics said either version has the potential to upend the city’s public school system.

Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald Streater told Chalkbeat in a text Wednesday that “vouchers are a red herring and will not address the needs of the families who depend the most on public education.” He said the voucher proposal “feels like a dereliction of duty,” and that fully funding education would solve many of the district’s challenges.

“We are on the cusp of an educational renaissance,” Streater said. “The last thing Philadelphia needs is any legislation that adversely impacts a scintilla of funding, resources and attention that would have any unintended or intended effect of kneecapping Philadelphia’s collective efforts and momentum to provide our city with the public education system our students deserve.”

Meanwhile, proponents of the voucher program, including the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, said it could have been one of “the biggest, most impactful, positive change[s] in education in three decades.”

Ultimately, Democrats in the House stood firmly opposed to any state-backed voucher program, blocking the budget bill late on Friday and killing the separate Lifeline Scholarship voucher bill in the House Rules Committee.

“This is an embarrassing setback for Governor Shapiro on his first budget and at the hands of his own party,” Erik Telford, a spokesperson for the Foundation, said in an email. “Shapiro would rather cave to Matt Bradford than stand firm behind his pledge to support the kids trapped in failing schools, despite having reached a bipartisan agreement with support in the House and the Senate.”

Pennsylvania’s other school choice programs

Pennsylvania already has two programs that promote school choice: the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Educational Improvement Tax Credit. Both give tax breaks to businesses that donate to organizations that provide private school scholarships to students.

Those programs are notoriously opaque as state law prohibits the collection of information on academic achievement of EITC voucher students in particular. Although touted as a boon for low-income families, EITC has broad eligibility requirements — up to 500% of the poverty line. Families with three children and earning up to $168,000 a year can qualify.

OSTC, a much smaller program, is targeted more narrowly to families living in the attendance boundaries of the 15% of lowest-achieving schools in the state. Philadelphia has 139 such schools, which represents 36% of the 382 in the state, the largest number by far among the 500 districts in the Commonwealth. Both programs have steadily increased in cost over time; today, they are collectively funded at $340 million.

Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters PA, which opposes all voucher programs, said in an interview the PASS program’s ambiguous language could open the door to double or triple-dipping, allowing families to obtain funding from multiple school-choice programs at once.

Critics of both iterations of the voucher program also said it didn’t include enough protections against discrimination. Voucher programs in some states have been criticized for sending state money to private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers.

“The goal of legislation like this … is to push vulnerable students and families into private and religious schools where they check their constitutional rights at the door,” Democratic Sen. Lindsey Williams said on the Senate floor before casting her no vote on June 30.

“Private schools can and do discriminate against disabled kids. Private schools can and do refuse to admit LGBTQ+ students. Private schools can and do refuse to accept kids because they are poor or struggling academically,” Williams said.

Supporters tout vouchers as lifelines for students trapped in failing public schools. Many education activists reject that idea.

Philadelphia and other districts like Reading and Norristown with high numbers of students in poverty aren’t failing, said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, an advocacy group that opposed the voucher program.

Rather, she said, “the state legislature is failing them by not funding schools sufficiently.”

Not all Philadelphia-area Democrats opposed the idea of vouchers, however. Democratic Sen. Anthony Williams, who represents parts of Philadelphia county, voted in favor of the budget with the voucher program included, saying parents in Philadelphia cannot wait for the public school system to improve or for the legislature to develop a new funding formula that meets constitutional muster.

The Shapiro-backed PASS voucher program would have cost $103.7 million but was contingent on a commitment that vouchers would be part of a full budget agreement. That pact would have to include historic education spending and fund priorities such as student mental health, special education, universal free breakfast, and “sustained funding for necessary and urgent environmental repairs in Pennsylvania schools,” said Manuel Bonder, Shapiro’s press secretary, in a text message Thursday night.

That historic increase never materialized. While the House added hundreds of millions in education spending to Shapiro’s proposed budget, the Republican-led Senate scaled back the total.

For instance, it eliminated $100 million Shapiro had proposed for school building repair — a desperate need in Philadelphia where several schools have closed due to asbestos — and increased special education by less than Shapiro wanted — $50 million instead of $143 million.

The Senate did increase so-called “Level Up” funding targeted to the 100 districts with the lowest per-pupil spending, including Philadelphia, which Shapiro’s proposed budget did not include.

Under the approved budget, basic education spending, the single largest line item, will increase by $567 million to a total of nearly $7.9 billion.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia board rejects five charter school proposals

2021-03-05T03:29:15+00:00

With barely any comment, the Philadelphia Board of Education unanimously denied five new charter school applications Thursday after hearing scathing critiques of all of them from the district’s reviewers.

Christina Grant, head of the district’s charter school office, described all of the applications as deficient either in their planned academic program, operations, finances, or evidence of community support — sometimes in all four areas. The office doesn’t directly recommend denial or approval, but these evaluations had few positive things to say.

The five schools were seeking to enroll more than 4,300 students. The district currently has 86 charter schools that enroll over 70,000 students, more than a third of the 200,000 total in the city’s publicly funded schools.

Charter school expansion was the main reform strategy initiated by the board’s predecessor, School Reform Commission, which governed the district for nearly two decades after the state declared it academically and financially distressed. The board has not approved a new charter school since taking over its governance when the district was returned to local control in 2018.

More than $1 billion of the district’s $3.3 billion budget consists of tuition payments to charters — and the state’s charter school funding formula hasn’t been significantly revised since the law was passed in 1997. Combined with a declining state share of overall school costs, this means that charter and district schools compete for increasingly scarce resources.

“The district does not need and cannot afford any more charters,” said Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, which advocates against charters.

Two of the proposed new schools would have been operated by Aspira, Inc., which already runs five charters, including a cyber school. The proposed new schools were the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Preparatory Charter School, for kindergarten through eighth grade, and the Bilingual Business, Finance and Technology Charter High School.

The community development organization has a troubled history dotted with investigations into its management and financial practices relating to its charters — including its use of state and local per-pupil subsidies for the schools as collateral for loans to shore up other aspects of its operations.

Two of Aspira’s existing schools, Olney High and Stetson Middle, are former district schools that were converted to charters in an effort to turn them around under an initiative called Renaissance Schools started by the SRC. But due to mediocre academic performance and questionable finances and operations, the board voted in 2018 not to renew the charters and reabsorb the schools into the district. But Aspira appealed to the state and the schools remain under Aspira’s management.

Even the SRC, in 2017, voted not to renew Olney and Stetson’s charters.

No district school has been converted to a charter since 2016 under the Renaissance program, and board President Joyce Wilkerson, who also served on the SRC, has questioned the effectiveness of the model.

Grant’s critique said that the applications for both new charters would give Aspira “outsized control” and contained “numerous inconsistencies in anticipating per-pupil funding,” among other shortcomings. It was proposed that many of the employees would work directly for Aspira and not for the schools, which would present a problem in creating a cohesive staff and school culture, Grant said.

The three other proposed charter schools voted down Thursday were Empowerment Charter School, Philadelphia Collegiate Charter School for Boys, and Pride Academy Charter School.

Empowerment was proposed as a kindergarten to fifth grade school in North Philadelphia operated in conjunction with the educational leadership company Jounce Partners. Courtney Taylor, presented as the principal of the school, said it would be named for Shirley Chisholm and would nurture students to be “activists” and “reach beyond their potential” in a close-knit community.

Several parents and community members spoke in favor of Empowerment, not least because it promised to be staffed by people of color.

“One of the things that is important to me is that children see someone who looks like [them] as a teacher,” said Ruth Williams, a community member. “I didn’t see a teacher who looked like me until high school.”

But the charter office report said the application “did not present compelling evidence of the founding coalition’s ability to establish and operate a charter school.”

The Philadelphia Collegiate Charter School for Boys, proposed to locate in Mount Airy, would “prepare Philadelphia’s next generation of young men,” according to its application. It would be managed by an organization that runs a similar school in Baltimore.

“Being in an environment with leadership of men of color can be transformational in the lives of young boys they serve,” said Eric Worley, a graduate of the district and longtime city resident.

The district’s critique said, among other things, that the application did not clearly outline the role of the management organization and did not present a curriculum that would meet state requirements.

In rejecting this application, board members Julia Danzy and Reginald Streater said that they saw value in gender-specific education, especially for boys of color, but that this proposal fell short. “This application does not contain what we need,” Danzy said.

Pride Academy, a K-5 school proposed for Germantown, planned a project-based curriculum to help students develop life-long learning skills for the 21st century.

Jamie Meekins is a local small business owner and potential parent who had hoped to partner with Pride in its hands-on curriculum around nutrition. He urged approval, as did parent John Scarborough. “I believe in the vision of teaching through project-based learning,” he said, adding that he would enroll his child if it opened.

But Grant said its application lacked “a systemic approach for its educational philosophy” and did not show enough evidence of community support.

Among nearly 30 speakers, about half opposed charters on principle, while echoing the shortcomings of these applications, and the rest offered support for Pride, Empowerment and the Collegiate School for Boys. No speakers at the meeting spoke on behalf of the Aspira charters.