Earlier this afternoon State Representative Dan Miller facilitated a meeting of the PA House Democratic Policy Committee at the Mt Lebanon Municipal Building. Representative Miller graciously permitted us to place our tape recorder right in front of him so that we could capture the entire meeting. The dialog of the entire meeting is posted here: State Rep. Dan Miller's Public Hearing
I want to personally thank Representative Miller for having this public meeting in our municipal building this afternoon. Whether or not you agree with the political positions of the participants, it is a great lesson in civics to watch how our government works. Everyone should make a reasonable effort to attend when these meetings are available. Finally, I’ll leave it to all of you to listen to the conversation and judge for yourselves and comment below; but I will offer some of my impressions from the meeting and a few questions to mull over as you listen to today’s presentation:
1. The comments from the three superintendents were largely gripes about charter and cyber schools. The first problem facing the districts is the loss of pupil revenue as students exit for cyber or charter schools. The second problem facing the districts is the lack of financial agility so that they can scale their resources in proportion to the loss of students who exercise their choice to leave.
a. Has anyone thought about why these rigid, high fixed costs are in place?
b. Has anyone thought about who put these high fixed costs in place?
c. Would a district based cyber school be an effective alternative as the superintendents suggested, or would there be an agency problem where the fox (the teachers union) is watching the hen house?
2. The comments concerning children with autism were interesting and heartfelt – particularly the commentary by Ward Three Commissioner Kristen Linfante.
3. The final comments concerning drug related programs were largely related to stories about those who were impacted by drug abuse and the programs in place to assist victims of the drug epidemic.
There were a few moments that captured my curiosity:
1. PA State Representative Margo Davidson said that she didn’t support the vilification of the cyber and charter schools. Why is it that an urban district representative from a major union city would value cyber or charter schools as an effective alternative to traditional classroom based instruction?
2. PA State Representative Erin Molchany asked the three superintendents for the career profile of their graduating classes – none were really able to provide a clear answer.
a. Are our school districts executing an education process with a silo mentality?
b. Shouldn’t the schools be thinking about specific objectives and directing resources in a targeted manner to maximize the economic benefit from our expenditures in education? - and shouldn’t the school superintendents be tracking the successful assimilation of their graduates into PA’s economy and thinking about corrective actions to their programs if their students leave unprepared?
It was a good meeting, and the most of the participants were genuinely interested in the issues that they discussed. What I felt was missing was a high-level state initiative that could pull all of the issues, gripes and concerns into unified strategy that I feel could alleviate the symptoms of a much larger problem.
John David Kendrick
