Tom Corbett's Missed Opportunity

After his election as Governor, I wrote a post entitled “Tom Corbett’s Incredible Opportunity”.

The election cycle in 2010 had been full of partisan rhetoric with labels like conservative, liberal and the relatively new “tea-bagger” being hurled at opponents with great disdain. Tom Corbett had pledged a balanced budget, and with less funding coming into our communities from Harrisburg, the big question was “What will these new political and economic realities mean to local communities?” While a balanced budget presented a tremendous challenge, it also afforded Governor Corbett an incredible opportunity to identify the core mission of state government and perhaps redefine the state’s roles. Local and county governments and school districts were put on notice and prepared for drastic reductions in funding. Last year school boards and administrations throughout the County and Commonwealth scrambled to identify where to cut their budgets.

Tom Corbett’s incredible opportunity turned out to be an opportunity lost. Rather than bringing his leadership to the State’s troubled educational system by engaging local community leaders, school districts and families, a year later we find ourselves in the same situation…. Projected budget deficits with few places to cut and in a very rough economy that has seen many residents lose all or part of their income, little stomach in many communities for any tax increase.

Successful education, broadly defined as the preparation of our children to compete in the world, is dependent on three systems: Family, Community, and School. A child needs at least one of the systems to be working well if he or she is to have any chance to succeed. With one of the systems functioning, the other two could be overcome. If a school system does its job well, educators could overcome family strife, and could overcome a poor community, and get their students prepared. But schools are only part of the educational process. Family and community have equally important roles in education, and a student coming from a great family support structure, can live in a poor community and go to a poor school, and still have a chance to compete. Ideally our children have strengths in all three systems, but the reality is all three are being strained with some near the breaking point. Schools are feeling financial constraints, as are families, especially single-parent households. Many communities haven’t quite figured out what their role in education is. Success in education requires getting all relevant stakeholders working from the same game plan, and aligning their efforts within a common framework.

We need leaders to step forward and engage ALL of the community’s stakeholders who can hammer out a long-term plan for public education. Our children’s future depends on it.

Valuable Education and Community Links

I was surprised at the number of emails I’ve received during my hiatus from the blog from readers who were looking for web sites offering information and basic data on issues of importance to the community. Listed below are a few sites I’ve recommended to folks, and these have also been added to the side bar on the right.

Education Links:
• PA Department of Education issues a Report Card for each public school, and this link in to their searchable data base.
• openPAgov.org is a project of the Commonwealth Foundation, an independent, non-profit research and educational institute. They present data in a very clear manner, and I’ve included these 4 links to their searchable data base of Pennsylvania’s public schools:
• Tax Data. Offers data on property taxes, taxes per student, analysis of all revenue sources searchable by County or District.
• Payroll Data. Has data on employees’ salaries, highest salaries by district, searchable by employee name, district or school by position and gender.
• Spending Data. Has data on spending and enrollment trends, district spending detail and allows users to compare district information.
• Performance Data. Includes achievement trends by group, school or district. Allows users to analyze district spending and achievement and poverty and achievement

The Community / Non Profit section has two links so far:
• Delaware Valley United Way is a web site offering information on the locally directed United Way organizations.
• Guidestar. With a free registration, Guidestar offers a searchable data base of non-profit organizations and access to information on their governance, mission and financial reporting.

The Government and Politics link are self-explanatory.

Let me know what you think, and if you have a suggestion for a site of interest please pass it on.