Problem with school funding
I saw this on a bumper sticker many years ago: “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” As a parent of public school students and as a Navy veteran, I doubly agree.
The Commonwealth Court is currently hearing a case about how we fund our schools in Pennsylvania. This is not at all surprising when you consider the disparities between what the state’s 500 districts spend per student. The district that spends the most per student in Pennsylvania is spending nearly two-and-a-half times as much as the district that spends the least per student. If you guessed the former is an affluent suburb and the latter an urban district, you were only half right. The least well-funded district is rural, as are many underfunded districts. This is an issue that adversely impacts both rural and urban districts.
In Pennsylvania we have a hybrid system of paying for public schools with both state and local school district tax dollars being used.
Affluent areas tend to have higher property values which can generate more property taxes and allow those districts to spend more on education than less affluent areas. This tends to snowball. A school district with a larger per-student budget can afford to spend more to provide better academic and extra-curricular environments (by hiring top-notch educators, building labs and stadiums, buying laptops and musical instruments, etc.). Doing these things, in turn, enhances the educational outcomes and the reputation of the district rises.
I work in real estate, and I am pretty sure that everyone knows that the three Ls of real estate — “location, location, location” — are actually just code for “school district, school district, school district.” So, the better a district is, the more competitive its housing market will be. Increased competition accelerates the appreciation of property values in good districts, meaning higher tax revenues, which further widens the gap between districts.
In order to help prevent this gap from continuing to widen, the state is supposed to allocate its education budget in a way that helps even out the spending disparities. In some districts state funding is over 70% of the district’s budget and in others it is below 20%.
However, with the difference in actual spending per student being 150% from the bottom to the top, it is safe to say this system is not working.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the case before the Commonwealth Court is the plaintiffs. School districts from heavily Republican and heavily Democratic areas are among them. They have come together across the political divide because the problem of treating students unequally is one that impacts children of voters on both sides and one that pretty nearly everyone agrees needs to be fixed, except for the small group of people in Harrisburg who might be able to fix it.
John Krill is the attorney for Pennsylvania’s Senate Majority
Leader in the case. During a rhetorical moment last month, Krill pulled back the curtain briefly. While questioning the superintendent for the rural Otto-Eldred School District (McKean County), Krill asked, “What use would a carpenter have for biology? …What use would someone in the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?”
Let’s leave aside how dismissive Mr. Krill seems to be of the intellectual curiosity of Pennsylvanians who work in carpentry or at McDonalds and what ambitions they may have. By using the argument that some people are on the “McDonalds track” and therefore not deserving of the same educational opportunities as other Pennsylvanians, Krill used his time before the Commonwealth Court to suggest that some Pennsylvanians should abandon their portion of the American Dream simply because of where they are being raised.
Krill knows that in our polarized world there are so many safe seats (on both sides of the aisle) that the elected members of the Senate risk very little by doing nothing to address this problem.
I am not a legal expert so I cannot say whether the current funding system in Pennsylvania fails the state’s constitutional requirements, but I can safely say that it does fail our students. Until we make it clear to our legislators that fixing the problem is a priority for voters from both parties, they will continue to leave the problem unfixed.