Racial bias revealed in state’s school funding
Studies by Pennsylvania’s education funding by two activist organizations demonstrated this year a clear racial bias in how that funding is distributed.
Researchers at the Education Law Center and POWER, which stands for Philadelphia Organized to Witness Empower and Rebuild, found that not only do zip codes likely determine the depth of educational resources available to students, so too does the color of their skin.
Even when the poverty level of a district is similar, districts with whiter populations get more basic education funding per-student from the state than similarly poor districts with a higher minority pop-
ulation, the studies found.
The revelation came about as a result of the passage of the state’s “fair funding formula” for education.
Until its passage, Pennsylvania was one of only a handful of states that had no objective formula for determining how much state funding a district should receive.
The formula takes into account the district’s size, poverty level, cost of living, tax load and other factors that can raise or lower the amount provided.
However, despite enacting the formula the state barely uses it, only providing a year’s additional funding based on the formula. In 2017, that meant only 6 percent of Pennsylvania’s basic education funding was distributed fairly.
Researchers wanted to see what funding would look like for poorer districts if all the state’s education funding were distributed using the formula.
As expected, they found that applying the formula to all state funding would significantly change the education dynamic in Pennsylvania for poorer districts, boosting state aid and, consequently, opportunity for students who generally begin school further down the learning curve than their wealthier peers.
But they also found that while poverty is certainly a factor statewide in determining how much per-student aid a school district gets, it turns out to be less of a predictor than race.
David Mosenkis, a data researcher and volunteer who put together one of the studies last year for POWER, along with an explanatory video, was among the first to see the connection and said what the data shows “is horrifying.”
Mosenkis took Pennsylvania’s new fair funding formula and applied it to all Basic Education Funding for each district.
Using that result as a baseline for each district’s “fair share,” Mosenkis then looked at various factors, primarily wealth and race, to see which districts were getting more than their fair share, and which were getting less.
The results painted a startling picture of discrimination.
Not only were poorer districts getting less than their fair share, the less white a poor district was, the worse the inequity.
“On average, the whitest districts gets thousands of dollars more than their fair share for each student, while the least white districts get thousands less for each student than their fair share,” he wrote.
“The results did surprise me,” Mosenkis told Digital First Media. “I expected to see poverty as a factor and, because of demographics, a similar result for racial factors. But even holding poverty as a constant, the whiter the school district, the higher the funding.”
Those conclusions were also reached by a study on school funding by the Education Law Center titled “Money Matters in Education Justice” and released in March.
“Our own analysis demonstrates that Pennsylvania school districts with above-average populations of students of color receive less state aid per pupil than districts with above-average white populations, even when both districts have similar levels of poverty,” the report’s authors wrote.
The Education Law Center study found that the 50 Pennsylvania districts with the most white students (an average of 99 percent white) receive $10,174.69 per student in state aid.
But the 50 districts with the least-white students (an average 38 percent white) receive $7,270.98 per student in state aid — a gap of $2,904 less per student.
“Poor communities of color thus face several layers of inequity as a result of Pennsylvania’s school funding system,” according to the Education Law Center report. “They shoulder the highest local tax burden and yet still receive less state aid per student than similarly situated, whiter districts.”
Mosenkis demonstrated the phenomenon by doing a specific comparison at the request of Digital First Media, between school districts in Pottstown and Mahanoy City in Schuylkill County.
Both have similar poverty levels and, according to the fair funding formula, both should be getting about the same amount of Basic Education Funding aid — between $5,550 and $5,750 per student.
But when you look at actual state aid per student, Mahanoy is getting $6,913 per student — $1,156 more than its fair share, according to the formula.
And Pottstown is getting $3,173 per student — $2,361 less than its fair share. That’s a $3,517 gap per student between the two districts.
The only significant statistical difference between the two districts is Mahanoy City is 84.5 percent white, while Pottstown is 39 percent white.
“This absolutely angers me,” said Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez told Digital First Media in April. “It angers me for what opportunities it is robbing from our students and it angers me for the economic burden it is putting on this community.”
A recent study by the Public Interest Law Center estimated that Pottstown receives $12 million less than its fair share in state funding each year — representing about 20 percent of its total budget.
Rodriguez is not the only person in Pottstown angered by this inequity.
The Pottstown chapter of the NAACP also expressed anger at the situation and has joined with POWER in calling attention to the bias and on state legislators to make it right.
“So our property is worth less, so our children’s schools are getting less money. We are putting a price tag on our children’s education based on property values?” said Johnny Corson, president of the Pottstown Chapter of the NAACP. “That’s not fair.”
“Pennsylvania has the largest disparity of this nature in education funding in the United States. And, shamelessly, by their votes, state legislators continuously make it clear that the value of Pennsylvania’s children depends of the color of their skin or the income of their parents,” Joan Evelyn Duvall-Flynn, president of the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference of Branches, wrote in a statement provided to Digital First Media.
“Pennsylvania’s school funding framework remains inequitable even after the adoption of the Fair Funding Formula. The ‘fair’ distribution of funds only applies to increases in money for education in the state budget, and as such, the extreme gap between underfunded students and extremely wellfunded students continues,” Duvall-Flynn wrote.
In September, those groups rallied at Pottstown High School to protest the racial bias in school funding.
To date, no action has been proposed in Harrisburg to address this inequity.