Susan Spicka and Jessica Shiffman, parents of public school students from Shippensburg, stand outside Lincoln Charter School in York on Tuesday to protest the education agenda of Gov. Tom Corbett. The Republican governor had just finished announcing his education agenda inside the school, including a push for taxpayer-paid vouchers for low-income students in Pennsylvania's worst-performing districts.

YORK — Citing high dropout rates in some public schools, Gov. Tom Corbett on Tuesday promoted taxpayer-paid vouchers as the ticket to a better education for low-income students in Pennsylvania’s worst-performing districts as he detailed a broader plan to improve and reshape public education in the state.

Under the proposal, parents who qualify could use the vouchers — dubbed “opportunity scholarships” by Corbett — to send their children not only to private or religious schools, but also to better-performing public schools. His plan also calls for changing how charter schools are established and teachers are evaluated, and expanding tax credits for businesses that fund scholarships.

With the Republican governor already slashing state aid to public schools, a coalition of opponents from traditional defenders of public schools to church-state separation advocates to lawmakers who represent wealthier or rural areas might make passage in the Legislature no easy task. Corbett’s main support will come from the ranks of the Legislature’s Republican majority, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, privatization advocates and possibly Democrats in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh whose districts include some of the worst-performing schools.

But Corbett, speaking in front of students at the Lincoln Charter School gymnasium in York, said the state cannot run from its failing schools and high dropout rates, citing Philadelphia’s 45 percent rate as an example.

School District of Philadelphia spokesman Fernando Gallard said the city’s dropout rate is closer to 31 percent when factors such as students moving out of the district or needing extra time to graduate are taken into consideration.

“We’re here because we can’t continue down the same path and think that we’re going to get a different result. We have to think and act smarter,” Corbett said. “We have to have the will to do better.”

Nationally, the high-school dropout rate was 4.1 percent in the 2007-08 school year, according to the most current statistics available from the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics. In Pennsylvania, the rate was 2.6 percent that year, according to the center’s information.

Corbett joins New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, both Republicans, as among the most active governors in pushing a “school choice” agenda. Approved by Indiana lawmakers in April, the state’s program allows 7,500 vouchers for students to attend private schools in 2011-12, although legal challenges to it are pending in court. Students have applied for about half the vouchers.

Christie has proposed establishing more charter schools and public-private partnerships in education, as well as scrapping lifetime teacher tenure, instituting merit pay in public schools and tying teacher compensation to student achievement.

In Ohio, a five-year voucher program based on school performance has grown to the state cap of 14,000.

Under Corbett’s plan, the vouchers would be available to families with incomes at 130 percent of the federal poverty level or less — a family of four earning no more than $29,000 — who are in the attendance zones of the schools that are in the bottom 5 percent in terms of standardized test performance, or about 140 schools. Public and private schools could choose to participate in a program to accept voucher students, Corbett’s education secretary, Ronald Tomalis, said.

If a participating school receives more applications from voucher students than it has space to accept, it would have to hold a lottery to prevent it from cherry-picking the highest-achieving students, Tomalis said. Education Department spokesman Tim Eller said 4,100 families could qualify for vouchers in one year.

Along with the vouchers, he wants to increase the $75 million Educational Improvement Tax Credit, establish new pathways for charter schools to open and make student achievement count along with classroom observation as part of the performance rating teachers receive.

Asked what proof he has that the initiatives would improve the quality of public education, Corbett replied, “First off, I have the proof that what we have been doing has not been working.” Asked how he will judge the success of the measures he is proposing, he replied, “Well, I don’t think anyone in this room can judge the success of it immediately.”

“This is a long-term investment,” Corbett continued. “This is an investment in these children, that when they’re our age, we have drastically reduced the dropout rate and as a result, I believe, hopefully reduced quite a bit the client rate in Pennsylvania of people we take care of because we didn’t give them a good education in the first place. So anybody that’s looking for instant results, that’s not going to happen.”

Tomalis said he could not yet put a price tag on the plan because talks about the package with the Republican-controlled Legislature are still going on.

A similar effort in the 1990s by then-Republican Gov. Tom Ridge and a Republican-controlled Legislature to approve vouchers failed. In addition, a more ambitious voucher bill proposed in the Senate stalled earlier this year.