Boo-Hoo! Now The Courts Are To Blame, And Only Christie "Gets It."

Beautiful.

Today, a judge found that Gov. Chris Christie (R) violated Abbott v. Burke requirements when he slashed $820 million in state aid to schools last year, because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts:

Judge Peter Doyne, who was appointed as special master in the long-running Abbott vs. Burke school funding case, today issued an opinion that also found the reductions “fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts.”

“Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase in spending levels from 2000 to 2008, our ‘at risk’ children are now moving further from proficiency,” he said.

“The difficulty in addressing New Jersey’s fiscal crisis and its constitutionally mandated obligation to educate our children requires an exquisite balance not easily attained,” Doyne wrote. “Something need be done to equitably address these competing imperatives. That answer, though, is beyond the purview of this report. For the limited question posed to the Master, it is clear the State has failed to carry its burden.“

Laymen's terms: You cannot simply slash spending on poor kids to balance your budget because you want to cut taxes for corporations and such. New Jersey has built into it's case law constitutional protection of funding for poor school districts, a group that usually find the budget cutting knife in other states, and would certainly with Christie. Christie responded with:

A Christie spokesman responded to the ruling this evening, blaming the court for exacerbating New Jersey's fiscal troubles, and sidestepping the central issue of unequally distributed cuts: "The court’s legal mandates on the legislative and executive branches of government have incontrovertibly contributed to our current fiscal crisis without uniformly improving education, particularly for the at-risk students the court claims to be helping with its rulings."

Essentially, Christie has been told "you can't do that." So now he's saying the judge is wrong, as is the precedent protecting poor districts. Why? Because Christie doesn't believe that in New Jersey, one of the nation's wealthiest states, extremely wealthy suburbanites should pay any of the bill for kids in Newark, Camden, Trenton, Jersey City, and even out in little old Phillipsburg. Don't get too excited or happy though. Think Christie will now go back on his corporate tax cuts, his opposition to a millionaire's tax, or cuts to corporate welfare in his state? Think again. Christie will not do these things, or anything else to balance his budget. He will blame public workers, President Obama, and the legislature. He'll end up either laying off thousands of public workers, or demanding enormous givebacks from them. With Christie, all the sacrifice is for "us," and not for "them."

Governor Corbett's Budget Disaster

Some great commentary.

If there was a moral to the story that Gov. Corbett spun Tuesday in his much-anticipated, first-ever budget talk, it was that all wealth is not viewed equally - at least not when it comes to Corbett's notions about bailing Pennsylvania out of its $4 billion budget hole.

To middle-class state employees, to upwardly mobile college students at Pennsylvania-funded universities, to the working poor who've looked to Harrisburg for affordable health insurance, the newly inaugurated governor sent out more sacrifice signals yesterday than a third-base coach on a built-for-speed baseball team. He even urged that teachers take a one-year pay freeze — an issue not under his direct control.

"If government is here to share the taxpayer's wealth then everyone needs to share in the sacrifice," said the new governor, whose relaxed posture and shock of white hair threw off an aura of imperial calm, even as he metaphorically jabbed a budget dagger so sharp that would have made Caligula proud. "Educators, Pennsylvanians await your decision."

But there's another group that's tapping into big-time wealth - a buried treasure right here in Pennsylvania -- that isn't facing those kinds of tough decision that causes a pay-frozen schoolteacher's family to cut back on groceries or cancel a weekend down the shore.

That would be the economically booming, mostly out-of-state natural gas companies and their multi-millionaire CEOs, who continue to rapidly expand their aggressive form of drilling known as hydrofracking, or simply "fracking," across large swaths of upstate Pennsylvania. The companies take in hundreds of millions of dollars without paying any dedicated Pennsylvania tax -- even as such levies are imposed in the other 14 of the top 15 gas-producing states, even in red-state bastions of free-market libertarianism like Dick Cheney's native Wyoming and George W. Bush's Texas.

There must be some reason why Governor Corbett would do something so extreme?

In a remarkable coincidence, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Corbett received a whopping $835,720 from oil-and-natural gas interests, including his largest single contributor - Marcellus Shale driller Terry Pegula and his wife Kim, who gave $305,000 to the Republican's campaign at the same time Pegula was selling his exploration firm to Royal Dutch Shell and pocketing a $3 billion check. Indeed, Corbett's career in elective Pennsylvania politics was launched in 2004 when an Oklahoma gas driller - Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy - funneled most of the dollars for an eye-popping $480,000 donation that went to Corbett's attorney general campaign from an obscure GOP fund.

There's a saying in politics that a budget is really a political document, and that was never truer than yesterday, as Corbett made it clear he believes in a conservative, tea-party-flavored philosophy that sees middle-income public employees like teachers as feeding too well at the taxpayer trough and government's main role for big business is to get the heck out of the way, that - in the governor's own words on gas drilling- "[L]imited government means not mistaking someone else's property for your own." Longtime political scientist and pundit G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College sees Corbett on the road to becoming the most radical Keystone State governor in our lifetime, and after yesterday it's hard to disagree.

"Their philosophy is that the public sector is fat and bloated," said Madonna, who said he was stunned by the governor's scheme to cut some $625 million in funding - which is more than half - for 14 state-owned colleges and universities and state-backed schools like Temple, Penn State and Pitt.

Now it makes sense. Ideology, plus lots of money, equals bad policies. Unfortunately, we all suffer through it. The real question is, when do we wake up?

Welcome to Pensylbama

Un-freaking-real.

Gov. Tom Corbett is proposing to roll back public school education spending by 8.8 percent and gut higher education funding by more than 50 percent while calling for caps on school taxes, the elimination of some teacher salary perks and installing a statewide pay freeze for all public school employees, according to his first budget since winning election in November.

Corbett's proposed $27.3 billion budget for 2011-12 would set the basic education funding levels back to 2008-09, which amounts to a $550 million cut over this year's federal stimulus-infused basic education allocation of $5.7 billion.

"Mindful that salaries are determined at a local level and arrived at by contract and collective bargaining, this budget calls for all school district personnel — administrators, teachers, and support staff alike — to accept a one-year salary freeze to help minimize spending cuts," budget documents state. "Using conservative calculations, the Pennsylvania Department of Education estimates an educator salary freeze would save local school districts approximately $400 million."

The budget also calls for eliminating teachers' salary bumps when they earn master's degrees, a move Corbett estimates will save taxpayers an additional $200 million.

No, there's more.

Corbett's budget calls for a slight decrease in early childhood education for preschool and retains all special education funding.

The basic education funding essentially ends former Gov. Ed Rendell's and the Legislature's six-year push through the so-called costing-out study to add more money to the coffers of poor districts with weak inventories of local real estate taxes.

Corbett's proposed $5.2 billion basic education funding would supplant the costing-out study, which began in 2008-09, with a voucher program that would give either tax money to families or tax credits to businesses to help finance the education of children at private and parochial schools.

The basic education reduction is not the only thing that will affect schools. Corbett also plans to eliminate Rendell's popular "PA Accountability Grants."

I'm not done yet:

In addition to the budget cut, Corbett proposes to lift some unfunded mandates school districts pay, such as allowing districts to lay off teachers for economic reasons, increasing bid threshold limits and relieving "burdensome advertising requirements" for public meetings and public bids.

Corbett also wants to revamp teacher tenure rules, allow more flexibility to earn a teaching certificate, and tie teacher pay to student testing performance through a merit pay system.

Finally, Corbett takes a page from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie by recommending local taxpayers be given the right to referendum votes on school budgets when tax increases would go above inflation rate.

Ok.... wow. I'll start positive, I'm generally for referendum. Let's just walk through this insanity though.

• Cutting higher education 50%= spikes in tuition for Pennsylvanians.
• Cutting public education 8.8%= property tax increases locally, teacher lay-offs, and extra-curricular cuts everywhere.
• Got a Masters? Who cares, you still will make sub-private market pay, which isn't that great either.
• Early childhood education begins to be cut, as it will be for the whole 4 years of Corbett.
• Poor districts, where the parents won't just pay more to keep up the quality, will see their budgets hammered, and deep local cuts come into play. Teachers, extra-curriculars, reasonable taxes? Bye-bye.
• Vouchers. Seriously? So we take away from the public schools, give it to the private schools, and hope to see better results. Oh yeah, and I don't have the details yet, but my money says the voucher is for less than tuition at most private and public schools. So only the well-off can use them.
• No bid contracts, firing teachers because you don't feel like paying them, and don't advertise your meetings. That all sounds great!
• Merit pay=don't teach in districts with high poverty and students who are unprepared for schooling when they start, you won't pay much!
• Changing the rules on getting a teacher certificate= make it easier for us to hire less-qualified teachers, and get them to take lower pay.

Unbelievable. What a step backwards! State Representative Jennifer Mann (D-Allentown) has already put out a statement that skillfully takes apart this joke of a budget. She has it spot on:

“The most troubling cuts in my opinion are the ones to schools. The governor’s proposal cuts a half-billion dollars from elementary schools and high schools, cuts funding in half to state system and state-related schools like Penn State, Kutztown and East Stroudsburg and cuts 10 percent off the top for our community colleges that are key resources to retrain laid-off workers.

"Without a solid school system we won’t have a well-educated, well-trained workforce for companies looking to locate in the Lehigh Valley and help improve our economic recovery," she said.

For their part, Penn State came out with a strong, yet civil, defense of itself today.

Pennsylvania is officially on the wrong track.

Right-Wing Nuts See Islam In "Race To The Top."

They get crazier.

A new memo that has been making the rounds in conservative circles is a dire warning about an onslaught of Islamic “Gulen schools,” a growing international network of charter schools begun in Turkey that offer “a blend of religious faith and largely Western curriculum.”

At the Educational Policy Conference, a large gathering of social conservatives in St. Louis in January, prominent neoconservative and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, and former Colorado State Board of Education member Peggy Littleton sounded the alarm on the “creeping threat” of Gulen schools hidden in President Obama’s landmark education initiative, the Race to the Top program, which encourages innovation in education, including charter schools. Littleton, who currently serves as an El Paso County Commissioner, told conference-goers that “the only reason [Obama is] pushing more charter schools” through Race to the Top is “because of these Gulen schools.”

ThinkProgress caught up with Littleton after her speech. She told us that the Obama administration “intentionally had already thought through how they could have a proliferation and a sneaking creep, if you will, of Gulen schools by embedding their acceptance and even promotion of charter schools under this new wonderful thing of Race to the Top.” She warned that these schools were teaching our children to “hate Americans.” Watch it:

Are you kidding me? I don't even know what to say about this, except to say that these people are in the "black helicopter" crowd.

Ron Paul: Education Isn't A Right

In Wisconsin, Public Workers Aren't Getting Rich

The Economist takes Governor Walker and Paul "Boy Wonder" Ryan to task.

All of this is coming up now because Wisconsin has become the showdown state for the public-sector union controversy, and Scott Walker, the governor, is claiming he needs to destroy the state's public-sector unions' ability to negotiate in order to deal with its budget shortfall. State workers, he says, are paid too much. But the Economic Policy Institute tells us that, in Wisconsin, public-sector workers are not in fact paid more than their private-sector counterparts. They're paid less. You can only make it appear that public-sector workers earn more by ignoring the fact that "both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts."

Nationally, 54% of full-time state and local public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 35% of full-time private sector workers. In Wisconsin, the difference is even greater: 59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers....Public employees receive substantially lower wages, but much better benefits than their private sector counterparts. Wisconsin state and local governments pay public employees 14.2% lower annual wages than comparable private sector employees. On an hourly basis, they earn 10.7% less in wages. College-educated employees earn on average 28% less in wages and 25% less in total compensation in the public sector than in the private sector.
The EPI study does find there's a class of public-sector workers who earn a bit more than their private-sector counterparts: those without high-school degrees. In other words, district attorneys earn less than corporate lawyers, but janitors at the district attorney's office may earn more than janitors at a corporate law office—provided the government hasn't outsourced its facilities staff to the same private company the law office uses, which it may have, since governments have been targeting low-skilled workers for outsourcing precisely because that's how they can save money.

Not only have the Republicans lied here, particularly Ryan, trying to say that these workers do better than the private sector, they've made $45,000 a year workers look like the poster child for deficit causing at the state level. All of this, to attack unions' existence, and to kill public education. What's going on in Wisconsin is an attempt at generational theft, by the GOP.

State Senator Daylin Leach Crushes The Voucher Argument In PA

With the election of a Republican Governor and Legislature, talk of a School Voucher Program has ignited in Pennsylvania. "School choice" as they call it, sounds wonderful in theory, but usually becomes little more than an assault on public education in detail. State Senator Daylin Leach, a Philadelphia area legislator elected in 2008, takes on the "school choice" crowd quite effectively. Here's a bit of it.

Recently, there has been a lot of attention paid to Senate Bill 1, which would for the first time create a system of taxpayer-funded vouchers which parents could allegedly use to “choose” what school their child can go to if their current school is inadequate. This is certainly a bold idea. It creates a very expensive, new entitlement program in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis. Given that, as a member of the Senate Education Committee, I feel it is important to subject this legislation to the scrutiny that any proposal this far-reaching deserves.

SB 1 proposes to give each eligible student an average of $9,000 to use at any other public or private school that is willing to take them. Over the course of the first 3 years of the program, this will cost the state several hundred million dollars. The first obvious question is where all of that money is going to come from. “School-choice” advocates say it will follow the child from the old school to the new.

The problem with that is that the old school will not save $9,000 when the student leaves. Most of the costs of running a public school are fixed. If a child leaves, you still need the same teachers, you still need to heat the building, pay the nurse, hire a security guard, etc. So if more money is taken from the school than is saved by the child leaving, the old school is left worse off than before: poorer, and with fewer resources per child for those left behind. This is particularly important because the bill creates a structure where the overwhelming majority of children won’t actually get to “choose” anything and will instead remain at their current school.

The bill says a student can use the voucher at either another public school or a private one. But no school is required to accept any child. Both public and private schools are not only free to set their own criteria for admission; they are free to not accept vouchers at all.

In the case of private schools, most charge far more than $9,000 per year. Supporters of SB 1 do not explain how the “low-income” people eligible for vouchers would come up with the additional thousands of dollars they would need to “choose” to go to their favorite private school. Further, it is highly unlikely that those private schools with strict academic or performance standards will alter those in order to participate in a voucher program. So even if such schools do participate, only the top students of any given school are likely to be accepted, leaving the rest of the students exactly where they were.

Similarly, public schools are also likely to accept few, if any, children with vouchers. We are facing dramatic cuts in state aid to public education. In this climate, “better” public schools are unlikely to subsidize the education of many students from outside of their districts. Who will pay the difference between the $9,000 voucher and the $20,000 or more that most of the better public schools spend per child now? Absent a source of those additional funds, most public schools will, quite reasonably, use their resources to educate the children of their own taxpayers.

And so ladies and gentlemen, we now can see why this makes no sense. It doesn't give true choice to the neediest kids, but it does deplete our public schools finances. This is why the best way to lift kids in failing schools is to fix the school they're in, not give them a little money to go looking around. Yet, the GOP has launched a full court press against public schools, from New Jersey Governor Christie cutting the schools funding to saw-dust on the heels of the top test scores in the country, to federal Republicans claiming that teachers are bankrupting America and killing schools with their union. Here in Pennsylvania, the old voucher program is back out, but at least we have articulate advocates for public education like State Senator Daylin Leach.