Thanks to the leadership of Governor Wolf and a duo of Southeastern Pennsylvania lawmakers, Rep. Joe Ciresi (D-Mont) and Rep. Wendi Thomas (R-Bucks), legislation to boost student outcomes and increase the efficiency of education spending may start to move in Harrisburg. Already fifty-five other state representatives are co-sponsoring a desperately needed overhaul to the state’s charter school law, HR 272, including three Republicans and 25 Democrats from across the five counties.  

Rep. Ciresi, a former school board member with more than a decade of first-hand experience with the mechanics of school finance, knows what is and isn’t working with the state’s education laws. His goal: “This bill enhances educational opportunity and saves our taxpayers money.” Sounds a lot like doing more with less. 

Tons of educational research proves that students with less cost more to educate. But the state’s 21-year-old charter law enshrines the opposite notion in law. A wealthy school district like Lower Merion is billed at the rate of $24,000 per student enrolled in a cyber charter, while a student from one of the poorest communities in the state, like Reading, is billed at $8,500 for the same education. Sound backwards? It is! Any taxpayer or lawmaker that likes the idea of eliminating $100 million of wasteful spending should see the logic of the bill’s remedy to this insanity: the state sets a reasonable and standard payment per student for cyber charter tuition (since the state authorized this whole process to begin with). 

Beyond the taxpayer benefits there are real student benefits as well. For the first time since charter schools opened their doors more than two decades ago, students and parents will be given the information to distinguish between high performing charter schools and their less successful peers so parents can make smart decisions. HR 272 sets the stage for a user-friendly way to compare academic performance among charters and to their traditional public school counterparts as well. For the early adopters of charter policy who argued that charters would create a dynamic and competitive market of educational opportunity, the bill’s intent to give parents reliable information must be a welcomed improvement. Any free marketer must agree that markets and choice work best when well informed consumers have solid data at their fingertips. Hard to argue that this element of the bill does anything but improve school choice.

Another added benefit for students is that the bill increases the pressure on the poorly performing charters to up their game in order to stay open. Charters that fail to do so will be closed down. High quality charters get the benefit here as the stain of association with badly performing actors in the same sector can finally be wiped away.  

Advocates for smaller government and lower taxes hold fast to the refrain that we must do more with less. Today, with bi-partisan support, the lawmakers’ ambitious education reform package does just that. It seeks to increase educational opportunity for students in Pennsylvania while wringing the waste out of the state’s 20-year-old charter law.