Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Biden in Pa. presses for jobs bill and rehiring teachers

YORK - Vice President Joe Biden traveled to this aging industrial city Tuesday to tout the Obama administration's plan to put laid off teachers back to work, stepping into an education reform debate now percolating in Pennsylvania.

Vice President Joe Biden visited York, Pa., on Tuesday to tout the Obama administration's plan to put laid off teachers back to work. (Charles Fox / Staff Photographer)
Vice President Joe Biden visited York, Pa., on Tuesday to tout the Obama administration's plan to put laid off teachers back to work. (Charles Fox / Staff Photographer)Read more

YORK - Vice President Joe Biden traveled to this aging industrial city Tuesday to tout the Obama administration's plan to put laid off teachers back to work, stepping into an education reform debate now percolating in Pennsylvania.

Biden addressed teachers and parents at Goode Elementary, located in a school district where 80 percent of the students are poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches but where several schools had recently shown gains in student achievement tests.

A week ago, Gov. Corbett appeared at Lincoln Charter School, just a mile away, to pitch his tuition voucher program as the answer to improving education.

His plan - which has yet to be drafted as legislation - targets failing schools by shifting public funding, in large part, away from school districts to individual families who would decided where a child attends school.

On Tuesday, Biden took aim squarely at Gov. Corbett and the Republican-controlled legislature, detailing how the $800 million in state budget cuts has left 14,000 teachers out of work; that includes the elimination of 14 of 45 teachers at Goode Elementary, where students had begun to show improvement in state test scores.

"Just as you are getting up and are starting to run, the budget cuts get dumped on you," Biden told the crowd of several hundred, including Mayor Kim Bracey, crammed in the school's library.

The York school district lost 15 percent of its funding in the 2011-2012 state budget and had to slash 25 percent (or 123) of its teacher and support staff jobs.

Speaking in an uncharacteristically somber tone, Biden recalled his hardscrabble upbringing in Scranton, how the family followed his father to a better job in Wilmington, and how teachers influenced him throughout his childhood.

Biden said he chose an elementary school because studies show budget cuts - while difficult for high school students - have an even more "devastating" affect on elementary school students and their potential for future achievement.

Biden - who with President Obama is touring the country in a full-court press to get a jobs bill through Congress - compared the nation's economy to a car in need of engine repair, and said the country needs the investment to put thousands of teachers, police and firefighters back to work and "keep this thing in motion."

"Children are paying the price for the recession more than any other Americans," he said. "People say we're in a campaign, we are, to change this environment."

Corbett last week said he wanted to change the environment for the state's roughly 140 lowest performing schools - among them several that would qualify for voucher funding in York.

He blamed school districts for both overspending and failing their students, contending that competition with charter and private schools would improve the public schools.

"We can't continue down the same path and think we are going get a different result," the governor said. "We have to think and act smarter."

Biden took a different approach, praising the York teachers for taking a pay freeze that helped preserve full-day kindergarten and arguing that additional investment would preserve the gains made and help the economy by restoring teachers' jobs.

"No one can tell what impact [the cuts] will have on these beautiful children," said Biden. "I do know one thing, the cuts won't have a positive impact on them."