Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett is facing a tough battle for reelection this fall. He ran as a moderate in 2010, but ever since he took office, he's moved sharply to the right.
Mike Crossey was not terribly alarmed on Election Night 2010 when he heard that Corbett had won. After working thirty-four years as a public school teacher, most of them in special education in a community near Pittsburgh, Crossey was vice president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state's largest union for teachers and public school employees. The teachers' union had actually endorsed Corbett in his prior races for attorney general.
Corbett ran for governor as a clean-government centrist who would take the politics out of Harrisburg and get things done. His résumé even included one year as a high school civics and history teacher before he went to law school.
"That Corbett would govern as an extreme rightwing ideologue was not known to us then," Crossey, who is now the union's president, says. "He's gone completely off the ranch."
And he's kept on going.
"For a governor who is down twenty-two points in the polls, Corbett is keeping us very busy," Crossey said between sessions at this year's Pennsylvania State Education Association summer leadership retreat on the Gettysburg College campus.
After three-and-a-half years of attacking public servants and privatizing public service, Corbett is going after public pensions.
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"To me, it's something that has to be done whether it's this year, or next year or the year after," Corbett said during a campaign appearance in Erie in July. He reiterated that he might call a special session of the legislature to deal with pensions before the regular session resumes in January, when he may no longer be governor.
The current Corbett-backed proposal would begin to replace the state's defined benefit system for teachers and other public employees with a 401(k). Research shows that the proposal would reduce pensioners' standard of living without saving the state much money.
Then again, saving money might not be the point.
Corbett signed legislation cutting taxes on businesses by about $1.2 billion.
"The governor could fund our schools and pensions both if he would enact legislation requiring Marcellus Shale drillers to pay a severance tax comparable to other states, and pursue revenue options that recoup some of the over $3 billion we give away each year to corporations," says Keystone Research Center executive director Stephen Herzenberg.
But Corbett doesn't want to get tough on corporations.
Quite the contrary.
Immediately after taking office, Corbett slashed public education funding by $1.1 billion in the first budget he introduced. He threw his support behind the movement for for-profit charter schools and took virtually every opportunity he could to form common cause with the Tea Party Patriots and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
More than anything else, Corbett and his allies have taken up bill after bill from the ALEC library to attempt to create voucher schools, subsidize charter schools and cyber schools, demonize teachers, and weaken unions.
This has delighted the private school profiteers who backed him.
Vahan Gureghian, whose private company runs 150 charter schools in nine states, has given more than $330,000 to Corbett's campaigns. Gureghian was Corbett's largest campaign donor last time around and a member of Corbett's transition team and education committee. One of the education committee's cochairs is Joel Greenberg, a hedge fund manager who is part of a group that started a pro-voucher political action committee with an initial bankroll of $5 million.
Public school students in Philadelphia and low-income school districts have been hit the hardest by Corbett. One-third of the cuts in Corbett's budget were to the Philadelphia school district, resulting in twenty-three school closings, the layoffs of more than 3,000 teachers and teacher aides, and increased class sizes. Throughout the state, there were more than 20,000 teacher layoffs.
Charter schools receive taxpayer funds from local districts based on the per-pupil cost in that district. In Pennsylvania, this number ranges widely from $5,794 in the Chester Upland School District outside of Philadelphia to $16,389 in suburban Philadelphia's Lower Merion School District. Charter schools are exempt from most state regulations, and there is little public transparency regarding their management. In addition to siphoning direct aid from school districts, charter schools can receive tax-deductible donations from wealthy corporate backers.
Today, there are 162 brick-and-mortar charter schools in the state and 14 "cyber" charter schools funded by taxpayers.
But charter schools in Pennsylvania -- and elsewhere -- often fail to perform as well as public schools.
In 2012-13, one state measure of academic success used a scale of 100 to score schools. For traditional public schools the average score was 77, for charter schools it was 66, and for cyber schools 47. No cyber school managed to meet 70, the minimum standard. Eight cyber schools scored worse than 50.
Additionally, only 75 percent of the full-time teachers in charters statewide are required to be licensed, and their salaries are on average significantly lower than in traditional schools. Less money paid to teachers means less money spent in the communities where those teachers live.
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Many charters have been improperly charging the state rental fees for buildings that they own. The state auditor calls this practice "ridiculous" and says oversight of Pennsylvania charter schools is "a mess." Corbett is toeing the ALEC line not just on school privatization but across the board.
"I haven't looked this up, but it seems like everything Corbett is doing comes right out of the ALEC playbook," Crossey says. "He's following the exact same agenda so many other governors across the country are following."
After the 2008 election, ALEC made voter ID laws a top priority, and Corbett led Pennsylvania's effort to adopt one of the strictest in the nation. The measure was later halted by the courts, and the state has just decided to end its appeals.
Corbett signed new "Stand Your Ground" legislation based on the ALEC/NRA model that makes it easier to get away with shooting someone to death and harder for the victim's family to sue the killer.
He supported ALEC-inspired bills to undermine the federal Affordable Care Act by refusing to set up state exchanges and turning away Medicaid funding.
He backed ALEC "tort reform" legislation that would make it harder for Pennsylvania families to hold corporations accountable in Pennsylvania courts for injuring or killing their loved ones.
Corbett has consistently opposed minimum wage increases and attacked unions, this year with an ALEC "Paycheck Protection" bill that would prevent school districts and other public employers from deducting union dues through payroll systems.
The latest poll in July has Corbett trailing his Democratic opponent Tom Wolf by thirteen points.
Wolf is a wealthy heir to a family-owned building-product company and the state's former secretary of the Department of Revenue under Governor Ed Rendell. Crossey acknowledges that the "Anybody But Corbett" sentiment is stronger among his members than pro-Wolf feelings, but he says Wolf is right on public education issues.
Seventy-seven percent of Pennsylvania voters are very worried about the state's direction where public education is concerned, and a majority support tax increases and an end to further corporate tax cuts.
A poll in late June of Pennsylvania registered voters found 59 percent saying the state is "off on the wrong track." Only 26 percent say Corbett has performed well enough to deserve reelection. Of those who rate Corbett's job performance as "fair" or "poor," 27 percent say their ratings are based on his handling of education issues. That survey found that few people believe Corbett can be trusted to make the right decisions or that he cares about ordinary people. The polls show Corbett faring even worse than fellow Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum before Santorum's epic Senate loss in 2006.
Pennsylvania is a blue state that Barack Obama won by ten points in 2008 and five in 2012.
No incumbent governor has ever lost reelection in Pennsylvania's state history.
Corbett may be the first.
Dustin Beilke lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and has written for many publications, including Mother Jones, The Nation, Newsday, PR Watch, Salon.com, FightingBob.com, and the Capital Times.