Summary: Policy Brief Vol. 24, No. 39, examined a school consolidation plan put forth by consultants at the request of the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) board. After a year of presentations, community input, revisions, updates and deliberations, the PPS board voted against the finalized plan on Nov. 25. This Brief will outline the proposed changes and financial impact for PPS had the plan passed.
This Policy Brief examines statewide student scoring on the Keystone exams given to 11th-graders. Several Allegheny County school districts’ results are also reviewed with emphasis on Pittsburgh Public School District (PPS).
The review begins with a look at the 2019 to 2025 comparison of achievement results since 2019 was the last year before COVID and its deleterious impact on educational achievement. At the state level, Keystone results for all three exams—math (Algebra 1), biology and literature (the stand-in for English) —all fell significantly from 2019 to 2025.
Allegheny County, the City of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Public Schools signed an intergovernmental cooperation agreement (ICA) on Nov. 19 designed to breathe new life into the long moribund Pittsburgh Land Bank (PLB).
And while the agreement grants the land bank broad new powers, including access to sheriff’s sales, a researcher at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy says there’s still much work to be done to effectively address the city’s “unproductive property” problems.
“The PLB has potential to more efficiently process existing blighted, vacant and abandoned properties,” says Alex Sodini (in Policy Brief Vol. 25, No. 38). “But it must be used in a manner which truly benefits the city and ensures taxpayers are getting the most bang for their buck.”
There’s no doubt that Pennsylvania will have to up its game to meet the massive increase in electricity generation required to power the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution now a full step in the front door.
How best to do that, however, remains the paramount question, says Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.
“But time is running out as the demand for artificial intelligence in computing is growing rapidly,” he stresses (in Policy Brief Vol. 25, No. 34).
