Cut this column out, put it on your refrigerator, and remember it on election day:
•School budgets across Pennsylvania in tatters thanks to Corbett’s billion-dollar cut in state education funding that sent teachers to the unemployment lines, class sizes soaring and scores of successful programs to the cutting room.
•Charter schools — the largest of which in Pennsylvania features one of Corbett’s most generous campaign contributors as its CEO — being promoted as the next great thing while they’re operating with virtually no control over the economic and educational viability of their operations.
•Tumbling statewide scores on standardized tests, which Corbett’s education secretary says couldn’t possibly have resulted from shrunken teaching and tutoring staffs and denying the youngest test-takers their own teachers to help them through their first formal testing, but rather are exclusively the result of heightened “security” measures to prevent what state officials consider cheating and some school officials say is not.
•A continued push for legislation that diverts more money from public education to private and parochial schools.
•Giant cuts in funding for state colleges.
•Abandonment of a hard-won commitment to use costing-out studies to ensure students in poorer districts aren’t shortchanged.
•Reductions in funding for early childhood education when pretty much everyone will tell you that’s incredibly short-sighted
