Newman-backed education bills approved in committee

RICHMOND — Gov. Bob McDonnell’s education-reform legislation for charter schools and two other initiatives won a Senate committee’s approval Thursday after going through an extensive makeover.

Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, sponsored the governor’s proposals, and said the Senate Education and Health Committee’s action likely means the bills will pass the full Senate and legislature. “This was the test,” Newman said after the 11-4 vote by senators, several of whom said they didn’t support McDonnell’s original bill for charter schools.

“Local school boards will get more tools that they can use to help our quality get better in education” under the three bills, Newman said.

The approval didn’t come quickly enough to earn Virginia a first-round approval for federal grants under the Race to the Top education-funding package that was announced later Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education.

McDonnell said he hoped Virginia would be considered again for the funds in August when the federal agency considers Phase Two of the program. The state had applied for $350 million from President Obama’s education grants plan.

The House of Delegates voted its final approval for McDonnell’s education package Thursday.

Newman was the Senate sponsor of McDonnell’s three proposals for charter schools, virtual schools and laboratory schools. All three were rewritten extensively in a working group that included legislators, the state’s top educators, and lobbyists for teachers and a local-school-boards association.

The charter schools bill, SB 737, received most of the attention in committee. Its chairman, Edward Houck, D-Spotsylvania, voted for the charter schools measure, saying, “this is a significant change for me.”

As a public schools educator for 34 years, Houck said he had always opposed charter schools. He said 98 percent of public schools are meeting educational standards, but a few are “not making the mark” of adequate yearly progress, despite financial incentives and help from the state Department of Education.

“We have to recognize that it takes something different, in these very isolated situations, to make a difference,” Houck said.

Nationally, about 4,600 charter schools are operating, but only three are in Virginia. McDonnell’s charter schools bill aims to improve the applications local school boards receive from groups that want to start up charter schools, Newman said.

“Local school boards are getting applications that are not functional today. Those are going to be weeded out, and they are going to be presented with serious applications,” Newman said.

The state’s existing charter-schools law is amended by the McDonnell legislation so that applications first are submitted to the state Board of Education, which will make sure it complies with state standards.

The application would then be forwarded to a local school board, which has final authority over whether to approve the charter school, Newman said. A local school board that rejects an application must post its reasons, and the applicant can go back to the state Department of Education for help in further refining its application. Still, the final decision will be made by the local school board after the second attempt, Newman said.

Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, said he voted for the charter schools bill because it didn’t make any significant changes to the existing law, other than “it enables the Department of Education to assist people in filling out their application.”

Sens. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, and Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, voted against the charter-schools measure. They said they didn’t like the possibility it could affect funding of local schools at the same time Virginia plans to cut its funds to K-12 education by roughly $730 million.

“I’m perplexed by this paradox that on one hand we have budget amendments that are cutting public schools by $730 million, and on other hand we have educational reform packages, including this one, that allows for creation of these new types of schools which will pull from the very limited resources that public schools already have,” Locke said.

Locke described the plan as being intended “to undermine public schools” and “a Darwinian philosophy” that plays “games of survival-of-the-fittest with our children’s future.”

Whipple said that legislators’ task of finding funds for local schools “is our prime responsibility” and “this is not the time, in my view, to put dollars and energy into charter schools.”