The Republicans’ bill also includes a new governmental body, the Public Charter School Commission, which Martin said would give hopeful charter school operators new avenues to apply to start accepting students.
He said it was inspired by Wolf and some school districts saying they hope to stop authorizing new cyber charter schools.
State Sen. Lindsay Williams (D-Allegheny), the minority chair of the Education Committee, accused Corman, Martin, and the bill’s other proponents of giving Democrats too little time to look it over.
She also called it a “massive tax break for corporations” that would only increase exponentially, thanks to a provision that would increase the credits by 25% every year so long as 90% of the available funds were in use the previous year.
“This means that these tax credits will grow to $1 billion in five years, $3 billion dollars in 10 years, and $8.5 billion in 15 years,” she said.
Williams is sponsoring her own bill that is more specifically focused on charter school reform, including creating stricter ethical standards for the schools’ boards of trustees, establishing statewide performance standards, and more closely regulating the amount of money public school districts must pay to charter schools.
Although GOP lawmakers expressed some desire to work across the aisle on school reform and Martin said he didn’t intend his bill as an “ideological statement piece,” Wolf’s office said in a statement that it’s nowhere close to something he would support.
“Various components of this bill make this bill a non-starter,” Wolf’s spokeswoman, Lyndsay Kensinger, said in an email.
For example, she said, the proposed Public Charter School Commission is “another unelected, unaccountable form of Harrisburg bureaucracy appointed by political insiders will only result in increased costs to local school districts that will be paid for by increasing property taxes for Pennsylvanians.”
Kensinger said the administration remains ready “to negotiate a serious reform bill that would improve educational quality, increase transparency, and contain taxpayer costs.”