In the near future, I will be reintroducing SB 1610 to provide for academic accountability assessments by non-public schools participating in the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program (EITC) and the Educational Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit program (OSTC or EITC 2.0).
Currently, non-public schools receiving scholarship recipients under the EITC and OSTC programs are not required to administer annual academic assessments to its scholarship students, and the Department of Community and Economic Development is unable to request such information. In order for the Commonwealth to properly operate these programs and students to truly benefit from them, parents must have access to the academic achievement data for existing scholarship students at participating non-public schools when deciding to which school they will send their children.
To provide this information, my legislation would require a participating non-public school to either administer an annual assessment or administer a nationally-normed standardized achievement test in reading and mathematics to its EITC and OSTC scholarship recipients. If the non-public school does not choose to administer an assessment, it may choose from a list of at least eight nationally-normed standardized achievement tests provided by the Department of Education. In addition, each participating non-public school must release test results to each scholarship recipient’s parent, as well as post the school’s aggregate test results on its publicly-accessible website; however, there may be no information that may identify an individual student posted whatsoever.
If you have any questions, please contact my office at 787-5970. Thank you for your consideration.
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