Proposed Reauthorization of the PA Education Empowerment Act
Analysis of Senate Bill 1192
This page contains a variety of information about Pennsylvania's Education Empowerment Act. The Act is scheduled to be reauthorized this year. One proposal currently before the legislature — Senate Bill 1192 — would greatly increase state control over hundreds of Pennsylvania's public schools.
The Education Law Center has produced an analysis of SB1192 and has provided data showing which schools would be impacted under the bill.
In addition, ELC has begun an ongoing dialogue on PaSchoolTalk.org about the Empowerment Act.
The analysis is below. The list of impacted schools can be found on a separate page: Empowerment Schools.
Other organizations have also raised concerns about SB1192:
As have parents and newspaper editors:
Updated April 23, 2010
Baruch Kintisch, Education Law Center, bkintisch@elc-pa.org, 215-238-6970 x 320
Sandy Zelno, Education Law Center, szelno@elc-pa.org, 412-255-6414
To learn more about the reauthorization of Pennsylvania's Empowerment Act, read our full analysis (PDF), review our Empowerment Act Comparison to see an alternative approach to the current proposal, and look through our data page to see if SB1192 would impose state control on your local schools.
ELC would like to hear your thoughts : Is this a necessary reform or an aggressive state takeover of local schools? Have your say at PA School Talk.
Senate Bill 1192 reflects an understandable impatience with the pace of education reform in Pennsylvania. It is frustrating for thousands of students, families, and communities when they seem to be stuck with inferior schools.
But SB 1192 takes the wrong approach in addressing this difficult situation. The bill would impose empowerment status on dozens of school districts and hundreds of individual schools in additional communities. And the bill puts the state in charge of managing school-level reforms in all of these places. That won’t work.
In addition, the proposed changes to the Empowerment Act would incorrectly function as if nothing good is happening in struggling schools and districts. The bill wrongly assumes that the only hope is to use drastic solutions such as turning school operations over to charter school companies. The bill also ignores the fact that most of the failing schools in Pennsylvania are under-funded and face complicated social and economic community-based challenges.
SB 1192 should not be adopted. Instead, the state should take a different approach.
- First, give struggling and under-funded schools an adequate level of funding.
- Second, encourage, empower, and support schools and districts to take the things that are working well and replicate them throughout their systems.
- Third, provide the Department of Education with the staff and the budget needed to better measure and report on school performance, to intervene with support and technical assistance for failing schools, to share effective reform strategies, and to truly hold local school officials accountable under current laws for achieving results for all students.
- Fourth, wait to see how the U.S. Congress amends the No Child Left Behind Act in 2010 or 2011 before creating a new set of state rules that may conflict with federal mandates.
- Fifth, fix the property tax system that places arbitrary and unfair burdens on the poorest communities in the state, making it impossible for local schools and communities to succeed.
Background
- Pennsylvania first adopted the Education Empowerment Act in 2000.
- The original Act applied only to a few school districts.
- The Act expires on June 30, 2010, unless a new law is passed to reauthorize it.
Senate Bill 1192 proposes to greatly expand the original Empowerment Act. The bill was introduced in February 2010, revised in April, and approved by the Senate Education Committee on April 20. It now moves for consideration by the full Senate. The April revisions to the bill rearrange some parts of the proposed new empowerment system, but do not fix the major problems with the legislation. Strong political pressures are involved with this bill, leading to some potentially inaccurate and misleading statements about its content.
Strengths of SB 1192
- The bill attempts to deal with the schools and districts that are struggling the most.
- The bill includes charter schools and vocational-technical schools in the reform system.
- The bill contains long lists of education reforms that could help many schools and districts.
- The bill addresses options for parent and community involvement in improving public education.
- The bill allows districts to form their own charter schools rather than using outside companies.
Problems with SB 1192
1. The bill does not provide any additional funding or resources to pay for and sustain reforms and does not fix the unfair property tax system. Most failing schools are in districts that have been under-funded for decades and have very high property taxes that drive away businesses. Ironically, revisions to the bill made in April now give extra funding for six of the current empowerment districts but ignore the fiscal needs of the hundreds of additional schools and districts that would fall under the control of the bill.
2. The bill would lower the standards and make it easier to place individual schools and school districts under the Empowerment Act.
o Currently, the Act uses a two-year average of both reading and math test scores and targets districts (not individual schools) with more than 50 percent of all students failing both tests (scoring “below basic”).
o SB 1192 would incorporate most of No Child Left Behind’s adequate yearly progress system of measuring school and district performance. The NCLB system looks at whether different subgroups of students – not just all students averaged together – score below state targets. A school would fall under the Empowerment Act if too many students failed the test – 44 percentfailing in math or 37 percent failing in reading – by scoring at either “basic” or “below basic” levels.
o The U.S. Congress is expected to make major changes to NCLB in 2010 or 2011 that will impact these standards and requirements. Revisions to SB 1192 made in April would make it somewhat easier for the proposed empowerment system to interact with the expected changes to NCLB. But SB 1192 remains committed to using only student test scores to measure school and district performance, rather than multiple measures that better reflect student outcomes.
3. The bill would place hundreds of schools and dozens of school districts under the Empowerment Act. Currently, the Act only applies to whole districts, not individual schools.
4. The bill would look back in time and apply reform mandates based on past failures over many years. Schools and districts would be graded based on the number of years currently in school improvement and corrective action status under No Child Left Behind.
5. The bill would give state officials power over all of the schools and districts coming under the Act, even schools and districts failing for just two years.
o The PA Department of Education would have legal authority to order the reforms it wanted at hundreds of schools and districts under the Act. Local officials could not override the decisions of the Department.
o The improvement plans for schools and districts could be amended by the Department, without the consent of local officials.
o A Statewide Control Board appointed by the Governor and the Senate leader would write the reform plans for and have final authority to amend and approve the management decisions of locally elected school boards in districts failing for nine or more years (beyond the fourth year of "Corrective Action II"). The time period would start running based on NCLB status from 2001 to date.
o This means that the Senate leader and the Governor, who appoints the Secretary of Education and other Department officials, would essentially run all of the schools and districts subject to the Act.
6. The bill would end the currently appointed boards for Chester-Upland and Harrisburg, return day-to-day management to the local elected school boards, and require all management and reform decisions to be initiated, amended, or approved by the new Statewide Control Board.
7. The bill would treat Philadelphia differently than the rest of the state. No changes would occur to the current governance structure or reform systems.
8. The bill would strongly encourage the operations of failing schools and districts to be turned over to charter school companies or to private education management organizations. The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the new Statewide Control Board would have the power to impose these changes or even to close the school or district. This could have the immediate effect of taking many schools out of their districts and taking the teachers at these schools out of their unions.
9. The bill allows local school officials to hand-pick parents to participate on school improvement teams and does not allow parent elections. In contrast, teachers would be elected by their peers to the improvement teams.
10. The bill does not give students a voice or a role in the school reform process.
11. The bill prohibits teacher strikes in school districts designated as failing for nine or more years, starting in 2000.
- View the text of the bill, the co-sponsors, and the votes for SB1192 here.
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- State Education Budget 2010
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