Governor Corbett plans to make an announcement on education policy in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, the state’s largest teacher’s union has released a poll showing strong support for its blueprint for education reform.

The Pennsylvania State Education Association says Pennsylvanians oppose recent funding cuts to education and oppose creating a taxpayer funded voucher system for private and religious schools.  The Terry Madonna Opinion Research survey found strong support for reduced class size, tutoring and alternative student placement programs.

The poll found 69% somewhat opposed or strongly opposed the cuts in education funding in this year’s budget, while only 27% favored the action. 59% percent said they were strongly opposed or somewhat opposed to vouchers, while only 38% were in favor.  

Jerry Oleksiak, Vice President of PSEA, says the association spent a lot of time looking at what, from their own experience and the research, works.  He says the things that families and the public are concerned about, things like discipline, safety, smaller classes, and alternative programs are things they’ve been calling for, for years.  He says they’ve formalized the recommendations in their document “Solutions That Work”.   

Oleksiak says they know what’s going to work in the schools; their members are there every day.  He says some of the “silver bullets” we’ve been hearing about, such as vouchers, merit pay or loss of seniority- those kinds of things is not going to help our schools.

Oleksiak says the survey is one more hard piece of data they can show to the legislature to show that the public supports public education and knows what works in the schools.  He says close to two-thirds of those surveyed are satisfied or very satisfied with their schools.   He says that number is higher for families with kids under 18.

Oleksiak says people know the schools are working and they don’t want to see funding cuts or vouchers that are going to take away from the success of the schools.