CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead:

PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

Like that bad enchilada that you just can't keep down, Pennsylvania's HB 530 just keeps coming back. In fact, it appears it will be back this Monday.

I wrote about this damn thing last summer, and it has ben kicking around since early 2015. The bill was floated by Mike Reese, who was actually trained to be a history teacher before landing in admissions offices on the college level. Nevertheless, his bill is a terrible bill for public education in Pennsylvania. He states that his bill has two goals:

1) Save taxpayers money by changing the cyber funding system

2) Improve school choice.

Those are unimpressive goals, both disconnected from an desire to maintain strong public schools, and certainly not addressing issues with "the worst charter law in the country."

It's worth noting that the bill is not fully beloved by players in the charter business. Back in 2015 the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools complained about three aspects of the bill. In PA, cyber schools receive 100% of the per capita costs for students in the sending school regardless of the cyber's actual costs, making the profitability of PA cyber schools somewhere up there with "selling crack" and "printing your own money." HB 530 says that sending schools can exempt the per capita costs of running a cafeteria (after all, cyber schools do not provide lunch), but the charter folks still find the deduction unfair. The bill also allows deductions for previous years cyber costs, and while this will only be a thing for two years, the charter folks are afraid it CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead: