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It’s Time for Combined Reporting
Testimony to Senate Finance Committee, June 29, 2023 To print or read full screen. Continue reading
Category: Testimony
The Lifeline Scholarship Program Would Undermine Public Education
My name is Marc Stier. I’m the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center. Thank you for inviting me to testify today. I’m here today with my fellow advocates for education—including the leaders of unions of teachers, who have dedicated their lives to our children—to speak against the Lifeline scholarship program put forward by Senate Republicans. The advocates for that program say that it will not take money from our public schools. This argument is thoroughly disingenuous. While money for the program comes from the General Fund and not from individual school districts, Republicans keep reminding us that General Fund revenues are not unlimited. The accumulated surplus that is supporting the operating budget this year—and is projected to support it for the next five years—will eventually run out. Any funding that goes to the Lifeline scholarship program will come from revenues that are needed to meet our constitutional and moral… Continue reading
The Real Cost of Opening a Window for Sexual Abuse Lawsuits in Pennsylvania
I was asked to testify about the claims made in a paper by the Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy that opening a two-year window for childhood victims of sexual abuse to bring lawsuits against their abusers might cost public schools in Pennsylvania between $10 billion and $32 billion. On its face, the claim sounds utterly absurd. (Not to mention irrelevant; if that is the cost of doing justice for those who have suffered from sexual abuse, then that is what we should be prepared to pay.) But as I delved into the details of the paper, I discovered that it was based on what, frankly, was a horror show of faulty research methods and statistical analyses. I was tempted to say—but in the setting of an official hearing in the Capitol, did not say—that this paper would have received no better than a D grade in the research methods… Continue reading