By Matt Hess
Ron Tomalis, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), was the featured
speaker at today’s Press Club Luncheon.
On April 26, 2011, the Pennsylvania Senate unanimously confirmed Ron Tomalis as the
Secretary of Education by a 50-0 vote. From 1995 to 2001, Sec. Tomalis served as PDE’s
executive deputy secretary under former Governor Tom Ridge. From 2001 to 2004, he worked
for the United States Department of Education in several positions, including counselor to
the Secretary and as acting assistant secretary of education in the Office of Elementary and
Secondary Education. After his public service, he was a private advisor and consultant in the
field, and most recently was the director of Dutko Worldwide/Whiteboard Advisors, based
in Washington, DC. Sec. Tomalis, born and raised in Camp Hill, is a graduate of Dickinson
College and is married with two children.
Sec. Tomalis said he has traveled throughout Pennsylvania in the past few months and has
spoken with parents, students, business leaders and educators on the prevalent issues facing
public education. “We still are a system of 500 school districts, which is an improvement since
the last time I was here in ’95 and ’96 when there were 501 school districts, and we have 1.7
million public school kids out of a total of 2.1 million children in education,” he stated. “Buried
underneath that number and census data that was reported out last week was the fact that we
have in the last ten years seen a ten percent decline in the number of school age children in
the commonwealth, we have seen a decrease of 115,000 school age children in the last ten
years. By comparison, however, the amount of money that the Pennsylvania taxpayer invests
in public education has gone up quite a bit. In 1995-1996 the amount of money that we spent
in public education in the commonwealth was approximately $13 billion. If you keep up with
inflation we’d be at about $17.5 billion right now. This past year we spent a little bit over $26
billion in K-12 public education in the commonwealth and that’s federal, state and local money.
Total K-12 education spending increased from the time the census numbers were given out
about 78 percent but the numbers went down. If you look at the number of employees and staff
that are hired and work in our public education system we’ve seen an increase of almost 20,000
employees, the number of teachers have gone up about 14.5 percent.”
Sec. Tomalis said the disparity was caused, in part, by a push for decreased class sizes but
emphasized that it has not generated significant academic gains. “We still have approximately
17 percent of schools in Pennsylvania that aren’t making AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress,
under federal definition,” he stated, noting that this year’s AYP target for math is 56 percent of
students being at grade level and 63 percent in reading. “So when we champion the fact that
we are making AYP look at the bar that we’ve set. Ten years into a lull, multibillions of new
money into this system, and our expectation for making AYP is a little bit better than a coin flip. I
don’t know if that’s the standard that we want to set.”
While acknowledging that some gains have been made by Pennsylvania students over the past
decade, Sec. Tomalis did not credit the gains to an increase in funding. “Most of the efforts
in infusing dollars into our public education system occurred 2006 onward,” he stated. “When
you look at the academic scores, most of the academic scores increased in the first half of the
decade. The trajectory for student improvement went up from 2002-2006 and went up from
2006 to 2010 but not as steep. In math, the PSSA scores during those first four years went up
15 points, yet after the money started to freely flow into the system they only went up seven
points. In reading, 2002-2006 school years our scores went up 6.5 percent after that time our
reading scores only went up 4.4 percent. One would think that if money was going into the
system to drive academic achievement why did the major increases take place before the
money came in?”
Sec. Tomalis said the governor called on the school districts to implement a pay freeze to help
save teaching jobs and programs, but according to a Pennsylvania School Board Association
survey only 30 school districts have had a “hard salary freeze.” He noted that $1.1 billion in
salary raises have occurred in public education in Pennsylvania since the recession began.
Sec. Tomalis stressed “salary and money are not the only things that drive quality education.”
Turning to the governor’s education priorities, Sec. Tomalis said a major policy issue will be
a focus on the quality of the teachers. “We want to take a look at how we evaluate teachers,”
he stated. “It was determined that 99.4 percent of all teachers evaluated in Pennsylvania got
a satisfactory rating. That tells us a little bit about what our evaluation system is and our rating
system is in the commonwealth. I think we have to take a very serious look at our evaluation
system.” Sec. Tomalis stated he strongly believes in school choice because it gives parents
with children in failing schools greater opportunity and he has seen “multiple education options”
succeed in districts across Pennsylvania. He indicated that the administration would also like an
evaluation system for schools and will continue to monitor advancements made at the federal
level with No Child Left Behind.
“There’s a lot on the plate and it’s the right time to do it,” he stated. “There are a lot of things
that are happening. Some things will happen regardless of who the governor may be. Some
things are happening in public education that are happening in other parts of the country that
are finally taking root here in the commonwealth and of course we’re doing it in a challenging
budget environment. We do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for the budget to get
better. We don’t have the luxury of worrying what the appropriation will be next year or the year
after. We don’t have the luxury of waiting because that third grade girl in that third grade class
doesn’t.”
Sec. Tomalis then responded to questions from the audience.
Do you support the consolidation of school districts?
Yes. What’s the magic number? I don’t know. One thing I think is important is how it’s done. A
top-down approach saying there will be this many school districts, I’m not sure is the right way
to go because we need to provide incentives for why school districts come together. The three
biggest hurdles for merging schools districts: debt limit, millage rates and the mascot on the
field. Those three things more than anything else keep school districts from coming together.
Will we do school choice in the fall or in the next week?
I would like to see a school choice plan as quickly as possible. It is my hope we get to that this
week. We are still under discussions with the legislature and we will continue those discussions.
It’s the right time to have this talk. Going back to the 1990s, we had some pretty aggressive
discussions about another choice program back in that time called charters. There were a lot
of people who said ‘delay, delay, delay’ and there were some who said charters would destroy
public education. Here we are about a dozen years later and if you take all those children who
are in charter schools in the commonwealth and put them in one school district it would be the
second largest school district in the commonwealth.
Which voucher bill does the administration support?
We support SB 1. We worked on the amendments, the changes to the legislation. We’ve
discussed it with the Senate. We had concerns about certain aspects of that bill and after some
lengthy discussions with leadership in the legislature and the Senate we came up with what I
believe is a very good compromise. The House has its own opinion as to what should be there
and what should be part of that and we are engaged in some discussions about that. We’ll see
what happens.
Regarding SB 1, there’s been some criticism among lawmakers that some of the tactics
used by supporters of SB 1 have been akin to negative campaigning against lawmakers
who don’t support it. Do you believe that has perhaps hurt the bill’s chances?
I’ve been in education a long, long time and I’ve been engaged in battles on education reform
initiatives in Pennsylvania and across the country. I’ve seen some pretty nasty things. The
amount of money that’s been put in to buy ads and to put together grassroots campaigns
across throughout the last decades hasn’t necessarily been weighted on the side of those
in favor education reform. Most of the money that has been dedicated to influencing public
education initiatives over the past 15 years hasn’t been about moving and changing the system
in a way that drives academic achievement. Most of that money, most of those tactics were
dedicated in a way that helps support the status quo. One very specific issue is the economic
furlough piece and how it relates to seniority. I can’t find a lot of studies that say seniority is
great idea as far as protecting student achievement and what is in the best interest of the child.
Would you rather have your child in a classroom of a teacher that’s been in a classroom eight
years and is an outstanding teacher or a teacher that’s been in the classroom for 15 years
and is so-so? If the organizations that are involved in education are really concerned that the
most important thing is in the best interest of the student then I think this would be a different
conversation.
What’s the most important education initiative that Governor Corbett has proposed and
why?
I’ll take two. I do think choice is one of the key, central parts of all this. We talk a lot about the
voucher bill and a lot about school choice. The system of public education is going to be in
for a shock in the next ten years. The system of public education is going to be experiencing
something that I can’t control, the unions can’t control, the school boards, nothing but it’s going
to happen. There’s a new generation of parents that their whole life has been about choice and
now they’re going into a system that says this is your school, this is your curriculum, and this
is your teacher. They’re not going to like that. In the next ten years they’re going to show up
at PTA meetings, at school board meetings and there’s going to be a clash. We need to build
in choice because it’s coming. Second is the teacher evaluations and teacher effectiveness.
More and more the research shows that it’s the quality of that person standing in front of that
classroom that drives student achievement. We have a system build in place that’s a legacy
system. There are a lot of protections for special interests that have been built up over the
years at the state level and the local level. We need to make sure that regardless of all the
discussions we’re having around budget, regardless of all the other discussions that the quality
of that teacher is the highest quality that they can be.
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