HARRISBURG — The state Senate could vote as early as today on a bill that is designed to meet Gov. Tom Corbett’s desire to overhaul Pennsylvania’s worst-performing public schools by helping thousands more of those students afford private and parochial school tuition with taxpayer help and making it easier to attend a different public school.

A rewritten version of “school choice” legislation that had stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate in the spring easily passed the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday, just a day after the committee chairman released the new draft.

Supporters say they aren’t willing to wait for public schools to improve to help school children trapped in failing or unsafe schools, and that competition will force those schools to improve. But opponents say the plan does nothing to help the struggling districts — for instance, by reducing class sizes or expanding tutoring — and they question how the state’s poorest and worst-performing school districts are supposed to improve after drastic cutbacks in state aid this year weakened them.

The rewritten bill adds a chapter on charter schools, but also it substantially scales back the scope of the previously proposed voucher program that would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and been available to children of the state’s poorest families. Under the new bill, vouchers would be limited to children in the worst-performing school districts, but income limits would be higher.