Willing to pay for more testing?

A guest opinion appearing in the BCCT. Here's a good point that parallels the questions Superintendent Yonson has been raising. She's asked how can we raise the accountability you want without paying for teachers.

Don't forget that the board adopted a resolution against increased testing.

Are the taxpayers willing to pay for more testing?

It’s the taxpayer who ends up footing the bill for the mandates, often through increases in school property taxes.

Thomas J. Gentzel is the executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

The Bucks County Courier Times editorial on June 18 regarding graduation requirements is filled with inaccuracies and is offensive to the dedication and successes of public schools in Pennsylvania.

Your assertions that school districts are handing out “empty diplomas” and that most school districts “cheat kids out of an education” are an insult to every hard-working teacher, school board member and school administrator working in a Pennsylvania public high school. Worse, they are not factually accurate.

Information from a recent PSBA survey shows that school districts invest substantial amounts of time, effort and resources into developing local assessments, aligning them to the state’s academic standards as the law requires. Many districts in your readership area fit that bill.

The Avon Grove School District in Chester County and Centennial and Central Bucks school districts in Bucks County are but three that have comprehensive local graduation testing and alignment procedures in place. These districts, along with scores of others, take their responsibility in this area seriously. To dismiss their efforts, as your editorial does, simply gives credence to the careless propaganda that proponents of this proposal are using to try desperately to win its enactment. The members of the General Assembly who have raised concerns with this proposal do so for good reason and should be commended, not condemned, for questioning a plan that is so badly misdirected.

The argument against the Graduate Competency exams is about more than the tests themselves. It is also about the funding. Although proponents argue that the full cost of the mandate will be covered by state funding, the reality is that the money will disappear rather quickly. More often than not, school districts and taxpayers are left funding a large portion of these mandates. There is no guarantee that the money proponents say will help districts pay for the costs of this proposal will be there in 2011-12 when it takes effect. Look at the current budget process, where the Senate proposed a 41 percent cut in funding for education that would cause chaos for school districts that have already adopted budgets. Not only has Senate Bill 1389 been proposed so late in the year that school districts do not have time to adjust their budgets, but it also ignores the results of the Costing-Out Study that was commissioned by the General Assembly. In the end, it is the taxpayer who ends up footing the bill for the mandates, often through increases in school property tax.

Let’s be clear: There is no disagreement about the need for students to be proficient in critical subject areas and to be prepared to become contributing citizens when they graduate high school. This is a debate about whether those attributes can be demonstrated through paper-and-pencil testing alone and who should carry the cost burden of more testing. The question taxpayers need to ask themselves is: “Are you ready to pay for yet another unfunded mandate?”