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PSEA Releases Survey on Public Schools

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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.

Textbooks

College Students Brace for Added Expense of Textbooks as New Semester Nears

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The tuition and room and board will be paid soon, and college students will be scraping money together to get their text books.   87% of college students have had to cut back on expenses to pay for  text books and 45% have had to cut back on food according to a Kno, Inc. college student survey conducted by Kelton Research.

A group of recent college grads has built a free on line service to help students locate needed text books quickly  at the best price.  Jonathan Simkin, CEO of SwoopThat.com, says the system automates the entire process of buying books.  He says students can select their courses and get a list of every book they need and every on line merchant that sells those books. He says the list also gives them expected shipping times and costs.

Simkin says Swoopthat.com also helps students find online vendors that will buy the old text books that they weren’t able to sell to the college bookstore last semester.

The  survey also shows 71% of students want to go digital.    Simkin says eBook adoption is still low, with only about 2.5% of the market.  He says it’s expected to grow to 20% by 2014.   He says it’s not clear how much electronic textbooks would save the college student, since there’s the upfront cost of the tablet or digital reader. He says quick studies they’ve done show students save the most amount of money by buying a print book and selling it back.

Kno, Inc. is an education software  company that sells digital textbooks.

Turnpike Commission Polling Cash Customers About Electronic Toll Collection

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The Pennsylvania Turnpike wants to know what cash customers would do if it went to an all electronic tolling system.  The Turnpike Commission has launched an online survey.

Turnpike spokesman Bill Capone says the purpose of the survey is to get input on the possibility of the toll road converting to a cashless system, or all electronic tolling system.  He says for people who don’t have EZ Pass, electronic tolling would involve taking a photo of their license plate and billing the vehicle owner by mail. About one-third of the turnpike’s customers pay with cash.

The survey ends on August 22nd.  It can be found at www.paturnpike.com/aet.  By completing the survey, you will be eligible to win a $100-dollar Sunoco gas card. 

Capone says people in some other states who are passing through Pennsylvania on the turnpike may not have easy access to EZ Pass, so an all electronic system would take that into account.  Right now, EZ Pass is available in 14 states.

The turnpike commission announced recently that tolls would go up 10% for cash customers beginning January 1st, 2012.  There will be no increase for EZ Pass customers.

Capone says the turnpike commission is currently conducting a feasibility study to look at converting the turnpike to an all electronic tolling system, so they need to know from their cash paying customers how that might affect them.  He says they want to know whether those customers would be willing to convert to EZ Pass or pay their tolls in another way.