On Tuesday, June 12, the PA Senate Education Committee will consider Senate Bill 1198, legislation that would:

1. Continue to mandate labeling schools as successful or failing based primarily on students’ standardized test scores using the School Performance Profile (SPP).
2. Give state lawmakers power to micromanage changes to PA’s federal accountability plan.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it is.

We cannot stand by as anti-public education lawmakers attempt to hijack our children’s public school evaluation and accountability system in order to promote the interests of the deep-pocketed school privatization lobby.

Click HERE to tell your lawmakers to oppose SB 1198. 

As part of complying with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the Pennsylvania Department of Education spent more than a year meeting with parents and public education stakeholders throughout PA to learn what they wanted to know about their students’ schools. Pennsylvania then developed the Future Ready PA Index, a system that recognizes our children and our schools are more than test scores.

The Future Ready PA Index reduces emphasis on standardized testing by ending the practice of labeling schools with a single number. Instead, it provides parents with a dashboard approach that presents significant and meaningful information about student opportunities, achievement, and success.

Anti-public education lawmakers want to continue reducing students to test scores and schools to a number. They want to continue using the SPP as a public measure of school quality to guarantee that under-resourced schools will be labeled as failing so that they can justify punitive interventions, such turning schools over to private charter school operators or implementing new private/religious school voucher schemes.

Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers now to ask them to oppose SB 1198. 

The recent school voucher vote in the Senate Education Committee clearly demonstrates that PA has plenty of lawmakers who do not support public education, but instead are working hand in glove with Betsy DeVos and other special interests to privatize our children’s public schools.

These same lawmakers want to give themselves a seat at the table when PA negotiates any changes to the state’s federal accountability plan with the US Department of Education (USDE).

SB 1198 would mandate that any changes to the federal accountability plan negotiated between Pennsylvania and the USDE be approved by the State Board of Education. Lawmakers sit on the State Board of Education and if SB 1198 is enacted, they would have the power to control changes to PA’s federal accountability plan and promote the privatization of our children’s schools.

Please contact your state lawmakers today. As you know, the next few weeks will be a dangerous time for public education.  Lawmakers will try to slip through legislation without anyone noticing. I hope that you will please hang in there and send these emails and make calls, if necessary. We are in the home stretch!