Regional Insights: Get more for our money in education, health care
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The recession has forced consumers and businesses to pursue greater value -- lower cost and higher quality -- in everything they do. With less discretionary income, consumers have had to seek out higher value products and services. This, in turn, has forced businesses to find more efficient methods of production while maintaining or improving the quality of their products and services.
The public sector is facing the same kinds of challenges the private sector has -- how to deliver effective public services with dramatically lower revenues. Facing a $4.1 billion budget deficit -- a 14 percent shortfall -- Gov. Tom Corbett has proposed significant cuts in many state programs, particularly education.
Although the governor's proposal would increase the amount of state tax revenues for K-12 education by nearly a quarter-billion dollars (2.6 percent), the net effect on public schools is a $1.3 billion cut because schools will no longer receive $1.5 billion in federal stimulus funds that former Gov. Ed Rendell had used to substitute for state funds. Although that sounds like a big cut, it represents less than a 6 percent reduction in total school spending, slightly more than the increase that had occurred over the past two years.
Many education advocates would like to see more state funds allocated to offset these cuts, but their energies would be better spent helping schools do what hundreds of manufacturing businesses and other firms have done over the past two years -- reinvent themselves to deliver greater value at lower cost.
Pennsylvania's public school systems are hardly models of efficiency or high value. Public schools in Pennsylvania spend nearly $13,000 per pupil per year, 17 percent more than the national average. Yet they don't deliver above-average results; the National Assessment of Education Progress found that fewer than one-third of students in Pennsylvania's schools were proficient in basic skills, barely above the national average, and that Pennsylvania high school students have the ninth-worst college placement test scores in the country.
First Published April 3, 2011 12:00 am
