Inquirer Columnist: Austerity Isn't Helping PA. Public Schools

[JPZenger]

http://articles.philly.com/2012-06-04/business/32007431_1_corporate-taxes-public-schools-program-and-staff-cuts

Excerpts:

By Maria Panaritis, Inquirer Columnist

"The Chamber of Commerce audience looked like deer in the headlights as Gov. Corbett’s secretary of revenue, Dan Meuser, droned through a Power Point presentation the other day in Montgomery County showing how Pennsylvania’s CEO was showering businesses with tax breaks. Charts detailed a Corbett-designed austerity plan in its second year that is generous to business but that falls hard on the state’s public schools, which are buckling under enormous funding pressures as we speak.

No wonder the Souderton-area spectators hardly came up with questions for the man afterward. Slide after slide effectively outlined what, to my mind, was the horror of Corbett’s cutting millions of dollars in taxes for corporations while doing little to come up with enough state cash for public schools to cover their costs. ...Corbett's remedy: cut corporate taxes by $800 million through 2014, give schools millions less than they need, and call it education "reform."

The smattering of attendees at the Chamber of Commerce lunch — an uncharacteristically small gathering, according to one person — sat quietly as Meuser laid out magical math behind a governorship whose economic policies are resulting in scorched arts programs, fired librarians, wiped-out athletics, and countless other program and staff cuts to schools far and wide.

The math of the Corbett administration, quite simply, is a starvation diet for school districts... Corbett has slashed hundreds of millions in taxes on businesses rather than retain and channel that much-needed revenue to the engines of economic growth that educate generations of entrepreneurs."