Fair education funding mired in mud-slinging

The residents of the William Penn School District are not going away.

In fact, they were back in court this week, volleying with state officials in their long battle to get something they are supposed to be guaranteed by the state constitution: an equal education.

Struggling districts like William Penn, with depressed economies and a sluggish tax base hanging like an anchor around their neck, deal with a system that penalizes families, offering children a lesser education for no reason other than their zip code.

The William Penn parents, along with groups from similarly depressed districts, filed suit back in 2014, claiming that the state was failing in its fundamental mission to provide an adequate – and equal – education, both in terms of funding and providing students with the resources they need to succeed in the classroom.

This week we heard from two of the defendants in the suit, Gov. Tom Wolf (representing the state Department of Education) and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-25th Dist. Both parties filed responses, but took starkly differing views of the basic claim in the suit.

Wolf, long a proponent of increased education funding, differed with the senator, who claimed that the Fair Funding Formula enacted by the Legislature has effectively remedied the claim. The governor maintains that is not the case, that there is still much work to be done.

One of the pitfalls of the Fair Funding Formula, which takes into consideration a number of factors such as a local district’s economy, language barriers, the number of special needs children and other issues in handing out state funding, applies only to new funding, not the basic state allocation.

In his filing, Scarnati argues that the issue is moot, that the passage of Act 35 and the Fair Funding Formula in 2016 adequately addressed the plaintiffs’ complaints.

Of course, Scarnati is not the only person with whom the governor finds himself at odds when it comes to education funding.

Wolf, who fought unsuccessfully in the first three years of his term for a new severance tax on the state’s natural gas industry to fund his proposed increases in education funding, is running for re-election. Carrying the Republican banner is none other than another resident of York County, former Sen. Scott Wagner who led the charge, along with Republican House Speaker Mike Turzai, against any new taxes.

Now Wagner and Wolf are lobbing grenades at each other with wildly exaggerated claims on education funding, with each man throwing red meat to their base.

Wagner has turned Wolf’s championing for more funds to needy districts into a battle of the haves vs. the have-nots. In short, he suggests Wolf’s idea will cut funding for rural schools in favor of their urban and inner-ring suburban counterparts. You can imagine how this is playing in the middle of the state.

Wolf has not exactly been completely clear on where he stands on this issue either. While he correctly said he stands firmly behind pumping a lot more money to needy districts through the Fair Funding Formula, he neglected to add that is contingent on the Legislature adequately funding all schools.

And of course that means a lot of new revenue. Right now the funding formula only applies to new funds, thus Wolf’s talk of dispersing the funds is more than a bit exaggerated.

Wolf, the guy who rolled into the governor’s mansion in large part because of a pledge to restore the education cuts enacted by his predecessor, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, is now being painted as the guy wielding a funding ax.

Wagner, who rejected every proposed new tax that could provide a new source of revenue for education funding while serving in the Senate, is now portraying himself as the savior of public education dollars across the state.

Wolf now has an ad of his own, casting the aspersions being made by Wagner as “the big lie.”

In the meantime, the citizens of William Penn and five other needy school districts continue to wait for a system that will place them on equal footing with the rest of the state.

We know this much: They aren’t going away.