On The Issues

In Depth

With a privatized school system, a new Pennsylvania Scholastic Standards Board (PSSB) would control the curriculum.  Here’s how the PSSB would work:

1. Schools are free to teach whatever they believe is appropriate. However, they must teach a minimum set of skills and factual knowledge that will enable Minor Citizens to succeed as adults. A Pennsylvania Scholastic Standards Board (PSSB) will establish and maintain academic standards for a core curriculum for the education of Minor Citizens.

2. The PSSB shall be comprised of twenty-one members divided into three classes of seven each. Each member shall serve a term of six years. The terms shall be staggered so that a class of seven will be appointed in June of every even-numbered year. PSSB members will be elected one member per County at a time, on an alphabetic rotation basis by County name, as classes come due for replacement or when vacancies occur. The PSSB will elect its own chair, vice chair, and secretary in July of even-numbered years.

3. All PSSB members must be Citizens, and no member of the PSSB may have any other connection, direct or indirect, past or present, with any government or quasi-governmental body. A minimum of eleven PSSB members must be parents of Minor Citizens. A minimum of seven PSSB members must be professional educators. A minimum of seven PSSB members must be drawn from business management.  Individual PSSB members can be part of more than one of these groupings.  School managements are encouraged to submit names of qualified nominees. Whenever it is a County’s turn to elect a PSSB member, the following procedure is to be followed:

• If the number of PSSB members who are parents of Minor Citizens is currently less than eleven, the County must elect a new member who is a parent of a Minor Citizen.
• If the number of PSSB members who are professional educators is currently less than seven, the County must appoint a new member who is a professional educator.
• If the number of PSSB members who are professional educators is seven or more, but the number of PSSB members who are business managers is currently less than seven, the County must appoint a new member drawn from business management.
• If the requirements for eleven or more parents and seven or more professional educators and seven or more business managers are all met, the County may elect any Citizen they consider best qualified.

4. Each PSSB member shall receive a competitive salary to be determined by law and shall be reimbursed for bona fide PSSB expenses upon the filing of weekly expense reports.  They shall receive no other remuneration or benefits whatsoever, excepting dividends and interest from private investments they may hold. All salaries and expenses, including contracts with consultants and/or testing companies, shall be borne by the Commonwealth.

5. The PSSB shall contract with private professional educational testing companies for the creation, calibration, and maintenance of a battery of standardized achievement tests. Tests shall deal only with factual historical and scientific information and shall scrupulously avoid subjectivity and matters of opinion. The tests shall be designed to provide a valid measure of each student’s proficiency in each major core curriculum subject and at each grade level. In a theoretically average case, a student would rank at the fiftieth percentile every year in each subject area and overall. An increase in the percentile ranking from one year to the next will indicate faster-than-normal progress during the immediately preceding year, while a decrease will reveal slower-than-normal progress. Thus, the PSSB tests provide an objective measure of the performance of students, teachers, and schools. The core curriculum subjects shall be as follows:

• English language reading and writing
• Mathematics
• Science (physics, chemistry, biology, with emphasis on the scientific method)
• Economics (microeconomics only) and understanding the free market economic system
• Computer science
• World, United States, and Pennsylvania geography
• World, United States, and Pennsylvania history
• Civics, including understanding of the US and Pennsylvania Constitutions and the principles upon which they are based