MEDIA — Gov. Tom Corbett is attacking two of his weakest polling points, his job approval by women voters and his efforts on education, with possibly just token opposition in the Republican primary and the general election looming less than seven months away.

On Thursday, he attended the kickoff of a women’s committee that will be tapped to help lead efforts to attract women supporters to Corbett’s re-election campaign.

Corbett attended with his wife, Susan, who told a crowd of about 60 gathered in a dimly lit restaurant in Media, a Philadelphia suburb, that her husband has a strong record on education. The appearance comes a few days after the campaign released a statewide TV ad in which Susan Corbett does the talking and stresses her husband’s commitment to education.

Part of the new message is an effort to push back against criticism from school groups and the four Democratic candidates for governor of his budget-balancing cuts to aid to schools in his first budget year, 2011, amid rising public pension costs and the expiration of the federal government’s recessionary budget aid to states.

“Now I’m sure you’ve heard the commercials and the accusations from opponents of massive cuts to education and it’s important as leaders of this campaign that you know the facts,” Susan Corbett told the crowd.

She went on to deliver a figure that is new to the campaign, that Corbett has increased his “education budget” in every single year, by a total of $1.5 billion. State funding for education, she said, is at its all-time high and Pennsylvania is one of the top states for per-pupil education funding.

Her contention that Corbett increased the education budget, however, is selective. It does not count aid to higher education, which is lower than it was three years ago.

Based on the campaign’s explanation, the figure also apparently counts proposed money in Corbett’s 2014-15 budget plan that has not been approved by the Legislature and it does not count the federal aid for public schools that was expiring as Corbett took office three years ago.

Counting that federal aid, the education budget remains smaller right now. In any case, the $1.5 billion figure is mostly made up of higher payments to public school employee pensions, not direct aid to schools for classroom instruction and building operations.

Corbett told the crowd that it is a “fiction” that he cut education spending, and said the federal government’s aid should never have gone to the operating budgets of school districts.