In response to Gov. Tom Corbett’s educational reform plan, local school administrators chiefly focused on opportunity scholarships that would specifically target the worst performing schools in the state.

Don’t be fooled.

Corbett’s plan has merit.

Corbett wants to let students in failing schools transfer to better schools. Corbett does not preclude students from transferring to neighboring public schools. His plan simply directs that the subsidy will follow the student. The governor calculates that the statewide impact of the plan would not be significant enough to offset the benefits.

Corbett also wants to increase support for an Educational Improvement Tax Credits program which allows businesses to make donations to help provide scholarships for private school students. The measure provides an incentive for businesses to help working families who choose to send their children to private schools.

The third part of Corbett’s plan would make it easier for people, such as the small school advocates in New Berlin, to establish charter schools.

The fourth point of emphasis in Corbett’s reform package would reform a teacher evaluation process that currently finds that 99 percent of educators are doing satisfactory jobs even as schools fail and student progress continues to disappoint.

The state Department of Education has obtained private grant funding to start a voluntary pilot program to improve Pennsylvania’s teacher evaluation tools. The only local school district to sign on was the Milton Area School District. Beginning in January 2012, participating pilot schools will use the new evaluation method and provide feedback to the Department of Education. This new evaluation will not be used to determine an educator’s official 2011-12 assessment. The department plans to review feedback from the pilot program before launching the evaluation system live in 2012-13.

After last year’s budget, it might be easy enough to fall into the trap of suspicion that Corbett is embarking on open warfare with the educational system in the Commonwealth. Corbett’s actions in his first year in office have fueled that skepticism. But Corbett’s educational reform plan offers tools for families to escape bad schools and makes it more manageable for school districts to identify those educators who are causing schools to fail.