Fall Agenda Includes Charter Reform Push
September 27, 2012
Take Action!
Push Renewed for Charter School Expansion: Ask Your Legislator to Vote No on Charter Bills
The short fall session of the General Assembly has begun with a renewed push to have a charter school
expansion bill on Gov. Corbett’s desk before the end of the year. Your action is needed now to ask your
legislators to Vote NO on any charter bill that ignores necessary funding reforms and implements
provisions such as statewide authorizer and direct pay.
Status of charter bills
In the midst of budget negotiations last June, the House amended and passed SB 1115 (a special education
funding bill) to include a charter school expansion proposal. The legislation included, among other things,
plans for a statewide authorizer for charter schools, establishment of a charter direct pay system, and creation
of a funding commission to examine cyber/charter school funding. SB 1115 was sent back to the Senate for
concurrence and is now in the Senate Rules Committee.
Meanwhile, the Senate unanimously passed its own plan under HB 1330. That plan did not include the
statewide authorizer, but it did include direct pay and the funding commission language. HB 1330 was sent
back to the House for concurrence and currently is in the House Rules Committee.
Neither of the charter bills provides immediate charter funding relief by revising the funding formula or
ending the pension “double dip”. With these charter bills each a mere concurrence vote from passage, Gov.
Corbett and Republican leaders are trying to reach an agreement on which charter bill to move. Although
there is always the chance that a new bill will be drafted and thrown into the mix, SB 1115 is currently the
most likely option as the vehicle for charter expansion.
Please contact your legislators and ask them to Vote NO on any charter bill that fails to implement
critical funding reforms and includes these issues now under consideration:
* Statewide Charter Authorizer
* Establishment of a Charter Direct Pay System
* Parent Trigger Proposals
* Right to Know Law Exclusion for Charter Vendors
Please contact your members of the Senate and House of Representatives now by clicking on “Take
Action” at the top right corner of this alert and you will find a letter prepared for your convenience.
After completing the address information required, the letter will automatically be sent from you to your
legislators. You can also tailor your own letter using the talking points below.
What charter school reform MUST NOT contain:
Statewide Authorizers: Sold as a panacea to a charter school’s problems, a statewide authorizer expands
charter schools while allowing them to make an end run around local school boards, diminishing any chance
to ensure that charter schools are accountable and responsive to their local communities. Although some
legislative proposals do not explicitly create a statewide authorizer by name, such as the proposal to
re-cast the current Charter School Appeals Board to give it broad, new oversight authority of cyber
and charter schools, they do create a statewide authorizer in form.
Direct Pay: Direct pay is not an innocuous means to streamline an administrative process. It is a means by
which school district subsidy dollars will be easily and quickly be transferred to charter schools
without an adequate review process by school districts. The proposal enhances the profits of charter and
cyber charter schools to the detriment of school districts and local taxpayers.
Parent Trigger Conversion: Giving only parents the authority to make executive decisions about the school
their students attend marginalizes other local taxpayers and silences the voices of the rest of the community
and the locally elected school board members. Parent trigger proposals alienate the millions of
taxpayers, including businesses, contributing to the public education system. A school belongs to the
community, those who live in that district, the students that have graduated from the school, those
persons who have yet to enroll, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. School buildings should not
be able to be transferred over to a private entity via a petition process.
Right to Know Law Exclusion for Charter Vendors: While not every record held by a vendor relates to
the governmental function the vendor performs on behalf of a charter or cyber charter school, those that do
should be accessible under the Right to Know Law. A blanket exemption of all records of charter and
cyber charter school vendors blatantly disregards the Right to Know Law’s public policies of
transparency and accountability and unfairly shields some vendor records from public taxpayer
scrutiny.
What charter school reform MUST contain:
An End to the Pension Double Dip: Under the current flawed charter school funding formula, a school
district’s retirement costs are figured into the payments it makes to a charter or cyber charter
school. However, the law also requires the state to reimburse charter schools for 50% of its retirement costs,
giving charter schools a “double dip” of pension reimbursement – once from the Commonwealth and again
from school district taxpayers. Fortunately, this windfall for charters can easily be corrected by removing a
school district’s employer contribution to PSERS from the charter school funding formula. Removing this
double dip by adding a mere 15 words to the formula would save Pennsylvania taxpayers over $510
million by 2016-17. There is no legitimate excuse to ignore this problem.
A Fix to the Overpayment of Costs to Cyber Charter Schools: School districts are overpaying cyber
charter schools because the existing funding formula is based on the cost to educate a student in the school
district, not in a cyber charter school. The current funding formula must be revised to ensure that school
districts and taxpayers pay the actual cost of educating a student in a cyber charter school. Cyber charter
schools impose such an overwhelming financial burden on our school districts and taxpayers that this reform
is needed immediately. Creating a commission to study the issue simply delays essential mandate relief
to our school districts. We know what the problem is -- let’s fix it now.
Increased Accountability: To ensure that charter schools are accountable to the taxpayers who are footing
the bill, charter schools must be held to the same financial and academic accountability requirements as their
traditional public school counterparts. Appropriate requirements and mechanisms for authorization,
oversight, and intervention, such as annual audits, fund balance caps, and a self-executing revocation for
repeated failure to achieve academic performance, are needed to remedy funding and governance concerns,
and administrators and members of a charter school board of trustees must be held to the same ethics and
transparency standards that govern their counterparts at traditional public schools.