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The Education Policy Bookshelf: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Studies
Get PDFMeghan E. Rubado’s annotated bibliography provides an index to timely and relevant research on the subject of public education, some of which has clearly influenced the course of the policy debate in the Commonwealth. This resource includes the themes of public finance, fairness, governance, economic development, testing, and lessons from other nations
Rebel Dignity
No full textIn this essay I expand on John Holloway’s assertion that the Zapatistas have made dignity a critical and essential moment of struggle. However, I also propose that in the Zapatistas’ hands we witness its transformation from a term of solidarity into a strategic concept. As a theoretical tool it must be reclaimed by excavating it from specific struggles, acknowledging its several components, and engaging its practical application as a map for struggle. By highlighting the theoretical coordinates that the Zapatistas have made evident in their political praxis, I endeavor to advance dignity as a convivial tool that promotes autonomy. Indeed, my efforts with dignity parallel the task Ana Dinerstein suggests for autonomy: “the art of organizing hope.
An Introduction to the Special Issue on Education Policy
Get PDF“An Introduction to the Special Issue on Education Policy” offers some context for big education policy questions facing Pennsylvania. It also previews the individual articles in the special issue.
COMMONWEALTH Forum: Should Pennsylvania Abolish the Property Tax for Schools?
Get PDFIn November 2015, the Pennsylvania Senate narrowly failed to pass legislation abolishing the local school property tax and replacing it with state revenues raised by higher income and sales tax rates and the extension of the sales tax to a range of goods and services now exempt. The legislation, supported by dozens of citizen tax reform groups across Pennsylvania, was defeated 25–24 when Lt. Governor Michael Stack cast a tiebreaking vote against an amendment embodying the changes.State Senators David Argall and Judith Schwank were principal sponsors of the legislation and vowed to continue the fight. Indeed, legislation to replace, reform, and reduce the property tax, particularly for schools, has been proposed and debated for decades, and some relief measures have been enacted, but the tax remains the principal levy to fund schools in Pennsylvania and in most states. Citizens in Pennsylvania and nationally consistently tell pollsters that it is the worst tax, and few if any elected officials will defend the levy, except on the pragmatic grounds that replacing it would require unrealistically large increases in state taxes.COMMONWEALTH invited Senator Argall, chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and Jon Hopcraft, the committee’s executive director, to summarize the argument that the tax is an antiquated and unfair levy and should be abolished. We invited Dartmouth College economist William A. Fischel, a nationally recognized expert who attended Pennsylvania public schools, to summarize his argument that, compared to statewide taxes, the local levy provides voters—even in households without school children—with stronger incentives to support high quality public schools.
The Limits of Medicaid Reform in Pennsylvania: Thinking Regionally about Access to Insurance and Health Care under the Affordable Care Act
Get PDFStates’ varied decisions with respect to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act have drawn significant attention to questions about equity across states. Missing from the conversation is consideration of the varied impact that reform will have within states. This article considers how low-income Pennsylvanians will fare under Medicaid expansion. Although Medicaid reform has already expanded access to insurance to significant numbers of low-income residents in the state, improvements in access to health care are mediated by pre-existing regional inequalities in social determinants of health and by Pennsylvania’s system of health governance. Drawing on lessons gleaned from the literature on regionalism, and examples of success in states that have adopted regional approaches to health delivery, we offer a theoretical approach for thinking regionally in Pennsylvania by building opportunities and capacities for cross-jurisdictional approaches to health and health care access
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, by the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
No full textFlesh in the Street
No full textMuch has been written in various media outlets regarding the causes of, meanings of, and, to some extent, solutions to events in Ferguson. Also debated is whether or not a genuine social movement is emerging, what form it is taking, and if it can be sustained as places like New York, Cleveland, and Baltimore take Ferguson’s place on the front page. While much of this work assumes the Ferguson Protest Movement and the now more widely known Black Lives Matter movement to be one and the same, a closer look suggests that the Ferguson protestors maintain organizational and political distinctions unique to this particular group and place. With this in mind, it is important to consider two questions. What was specifically different about the death of Michael Brown and the place in which he lived and died, such that this event sparked sustained protests around the world? And what is different about the core group of protestors that emerged from the events in Ferguson, Missouri?This essay considers a potential paradigm shift in the struggle against the well-honed logics of racialization in the United States and offers a little hope toward the future. As leaders of the early protests in Ferguson would later describe, the need to place their bodies directly on the front lines of the militarized police action initially rose as a response to the spectral flesh of Michael Brown’s body and had as much to do with pushing back against the historical disciplining of their bodies in space—as bodies out of place—as it did with protesting yet another police officer abusing deadly force. This was the critical factor that sparked another kind of flesh in the street in the form of the Ferguson Protest Movement. This intentionally orchestrated spectacle—of unapologetic Black life and flesh—in turn breathed new life into a fledgling movement that simply insisted that Black lives matter
Higher Standards and Lower Achievement? An Evaluation of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Exams
Get PDFAs the requirement that students pass three Keystone Exams to graduate from high school was set to take effect, a new round of criticisms arose over the adoption of this assessment system. While the Keystone Exams better align with the new Pennsylvania Core Standards as compared to their predecessor, the Pennsylvania System of Student Achievement, low passage rates especially among low-income and minority students have been cited as a reason to delay implementation of the graduation requirement. This work uses OLS regression analysis to explain which factors are most predictive of school-level performance on the Algebra I, Biology, and Literature Keystone Exams. It finds that race, socioeconomic status, and a school’s English Language Learner and special education populations drive performance on the exams. The work concludes by discussing possible policy interventions for the Keystone Exam program going forward
What Would Student-Based Allocation Mean for Pennsylvania School Districts?
Get PDFIn recent months, policymakers across the country have been exploring state school financing formulas with the goals of promoting equity, transparency, and adequacy. Toward that end, state leaders are considering a new model for disbursing state education funds called “student-based allocation” (SBA)—one that would allocate funds on the basis of students. In fact, many states already have some sort of formula using students as the basis, although in practice, most essentially use a hybrid set of allocations such that the portion of funds allocated on the basis of students varies substantially across states. This analysis of 14 states shows that among the sampled states, between 0 and 85% of all state and local funds is allocated on the basis of students. In Pennsylvania, after operating in the absence of a formal allocation formula for several years, the Basic Education Funding Commission (BEFC) was tasked with recommending a new finance scheme for funding the state’s schools. In this paper, we outline the rationale behind SBA and investigate the extent to which the BEFC proposal would allocate funds on the basis of students