Pennsylvania will cover a $5.4 billion funding shortfall over the next seven years under a proposal released Thursday aimed at bringing underfunded school districts in line with those meeting the state’s education goals.
The fresh funding would target underserved school districts, where a state court ruled last year that relying on property taxes to fund public education is unfair and unconstitutional. The proposal would do so by establishing funding benchmarks based on spending by the state’s most successful districts.
The proposal provides an additional $1 billion in property tax relief for school districts that collected the highest property taxes from property owners, $200 million to fund basic education, and $300 million for facility repairs and improvements each year.
“I believe that the report not only fulfils our duty as a committee to make recommendations on [basic education funding] but it also meets constitutional requirements under the Commonwealth Court guidelines,” said state Rep. Mike Sturla (D-Lancaster), the committee’s Democratic co-chair.
Advocates for the Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center, which litigated a decade-long case challenging the funding scheme and won a historic Commonwealth Court decision last February, said the proposal would change the lives of generations of students if implemented by the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a senior staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, said that while the seven-year time frame is longer and the numbers are smaller than advocates had hoped, “the actual vision behind it is still a transformational vision that will allow countless more children to reach their potential.”
Accepted by Vote 8-7 The bipartisan Commission on Elementary Education Funding’s report outlining the proposal is the culmination of three months of public hearings across the state during which teachers, students and advocates testified about the impact of Pennsylvania’s inequitable school funding system.
All Democrats on the committee, except Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny) and Shapiro’s appointees, Deputy Secretary of Education Marcus Delgado, Executive Deputy Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer and Office of Budget Analysis Director Natalie King, voted to accept the report.
In addition to setting funding goals for each school district, the report makes seven additional recommendations to lawmakers:
- Eliminate uncertainty in the funding formula resulting from fluctuations in poverty levels and restore baseline funding to this year’s levels.
- Reconvening of the Primary Education Financing Committee in 2029
- Invest in school facilities
- Explore Charter School Financing
- Invest in educational staff
- Invest in student support
- And consider education issues beyond funding
State Rep. Mike Sturla (D-Lancaster), the Democratic co-chair of the committee, said the report’s recommendation to set goals for adequate funding for each school district refers to a Commonwealth Court order to fix the system.
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Pennsylvania adopted the Fair Funding Formula in 2016, which determines how education funds are distributed among the state’s 500 school districts. But each school district receives a base amount of funding set at 2014-15 levels that can never be reduced. Only fresh money is distributed according to the formula, which does not take into account variables in school districts’ circumstances.
The commission’s proposal outlines a fresh method for determining what adequate funding looks like and whether a school district is falling brief of that goal. It uses Pennsylvania’s Education Performance Standards to identify successful school districts and takes into account the districts’ median per-pupil spending.
That amount, $13,704, is multiplied by the district’s student population, which is weighted for factors such as students learning English as a second language and poverty levels, among others. The product of those numbers is the district’s adequate funding goal. The district’s adequate funding shortfall is determined by subtracting what the district spends from the adequacy goal.
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Maura McInerney, legal director of the Education Law Center, said the most vital part of the recommendations is setting appropriate funding goals.
“That is what the Commonwealth Court ordered the General Assembly to do,” McInerney said.
“So adopting these adequacy goals is a paradigm shift for Pennsylvania,” McInerney said. “Instead of looking at how much money comes in and distributing it based on how much money comes in, we’re looking at what kids need to learn.”
Republican lawmakers have been critical of Democratic members of the committee over the proposed spending.
“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to modernize our Commonwealth’s education system and ensure a bright future for our children. Unfortunately, Democrats on the committee have been unable to come up with a new approach,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland). “Instead, they want to spend billions on the same old plan with no results. As I’ve said before, throwing more money into a broken system is not the answer.”
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Scott Martin (R-Lancaster) said he was grateful the committee reached consensus on several key issues related to supporting struggling schools, but he said Democratic members of the committee were using the process to make a political statement rather than to have a solemn policy discussion.
“The fact remains that we cannot have a conversation about how much more money certain parties want to spend outside of the normal budget negotiation process,” Martin said. “Setting arbitrary benchmarks without any regard to taxpayers’ ability to pay is disrespectful to the hard-working citizens of this Commonwealth.”
AND Competitive Report by Republicans on the committee was not adopted by a 6-6 vote along party lines, with executive power commission members abstaining.
While both reports agreed to employ demographic averages to make funding decisions more predictable from year to year, the Republican-backed report did not make changes to the fair funding formula to establish parity among school districts. For that reason, it did not heed the court’s instruction to adjust the funding system to be constitutional, said McInerney of the Education Law Center.
“We hope that all Republican legislators will talk to their constituents and talk to the kids who have been impacted by decades of underfunding and make sure they are fulfilling our constitutional obligation,” McInerney said.
Shapiro and lawmakers in the House and Senate will begin budget discussions next month after Shapiro unveils his 2024-25 budget proposal. The committee report is likely to be at the center of education budget negotiations.
