Leave the poor boy alone

I hate to say this, it hurts me to have to say this, but the local media needs to leave Rick Santorum alone about his kids attending a cyber charter school. The Penn Hills School District is in a tizzy because Santorum, while maintaining a Penn Hills residence, lives most of the time in Virginia, as do his children, but the district, as the media has told it, has to pay for his kids to attend a cyber charter school.

First, the facts: Charter schools are independent public schools, freed from most state regulations, which have to receive permission to operate from the districts in which they are located. When a child attends a charter school, most of the state subsidy their home school district would have received goes instead to the charter school. Although the home school district gets to keep a chunk--about 20 percent, if memory serves--for administrative costs, public school officials say that charter schools end up costing them money. (Primarily because they are still responsible for things like transportation, and because, they say, the loss of pupils ruins their economies of scale.) Cyber charter schools, because they offer instruction online, can draw students from all across the state.

So what Penn Hills is really upset about, in my opinion, is the charter school law, particularly as it pertains to the cyber charter schools that operate outside the district's borders and thus outside their control. And they are using Santorum--who, regardless of where his family lives most of the time, continues to be a taxpayer of the district and of Pennsylvania--as a straw man to protest the law.

Now, Santorum is a hypocrite in one respect, which Sally Kalson points out in her PG column today. When he first ran for Congress in 1990, he bashed his opponent, Rep. Doug Walgren, for living outside his district. A lot of challengers employ this tactic to portray an incumbent as out of touch with the folks home. And most, after they are elected, end up doing the exact same thing. Members of Congress may be public servants, but no one should expect them to work thousands of miles from where their families live.