Times Chronicle & Public Spirit
Pandemic highlighted inequity in school funding
Students in low-income districts have fewer resources to make up for learning loss
Perhaps nothing illustrated the uneven funding of public schools in Pennsylvania more clearly and more immediately than the COVID-19 pandemic.
Faced with identical circumstances, each Montgomery County school district responded in a variety of ways dictated by what resources were available to them.
When the pandemic closed schools in 2020, for example, Spring-Ford School District issued laptop computers to its students, and second and third computers to some households, allowing them to continue their education at home online almost without missing a day of school.
In Pottstown, by contrast, not only did many students not have computers at home, but the school district had to conduct a fundraiser to raise the money to buy not only Chromebooks for students, but also to set up and pay for online access to allow lessons to move forward with their lessons.
Now, a new report about how the pandemic affected the children of Montgomery County highlights not only the immediate impact of those disparities but how they will continue to echo in the lives of lower-income students going forward unless things change.
The report is titled “COVID’s Impact on Children in Montgomery County” and was issued last month by the advocacy group Children First, formerly known as Public Citizens for Children and Youth.
Learning Losses
An educational assessment of 1.6 million students across the country found that, on average, students had fallen five months behind in math and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2020-21 school year.
It’s widely accepted that COVID exacerbated the already existing academic opportunities due to the funding disparities between school districts.
According to estimates based on a Pew Research study, about one in four students in the Norristown Area School District, where 75 percent of students are from low-income households and 87 percent are students of color, do not have highspeed internet access, compared to only one in 26 students in the much more affluent Lower Merion School District, where 11 percent of students are low-income and 33 percent are children of color,” the report found.
“These students are more likely to experience learning loss because they are on the wrong side of the digital divide,” the report’s authors wrote.
The “Digital Divide” is just one aspect of the resource gap between lowincome districts and those with more resources, making the climb out of the learning loss hole that much harder in poorer districts.
Fewer Resources for Catching Up
“The resource gap has the most severe impact in districts that have the least resources and educate high concentrations of low-income students. For instance, the Pottstown School District has $10,700 per student for instruction,” the report’s authors wrote.
Pottstown’s students “are six times more likely to be low-income and twice as likely to be students of color than their counterparts in Lower Merion, which has $17,900 per student to educate its pupils,” according to Children First’s citation of data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. “This illustrates the irrational methodology used to fund public education in Pennsylvania.”
“These financial and economic disparities were pronounced before COVID where students in the Pottstown School District were also, unsurprisingly, much further behind academically than the students in Lower Merion or any of the other districts with more resources in the county. This trend holds true across all the districts in the county — the higher the poverty rate of the district, the fewer resources schools have to educate their students, and the further behind the students are academically,” Children First reported
“The 12 school districts that educate 79 percent of the county’s lowest-income students and 73 percent of the county’s students of color have, on average, about $78,000 less to spend per classroom (of 25 students),” the report found.
Children First reported that “Montgomery County was the first of the five southeastern Pennsylvania counties to direct pandemic relief to school districts. A quarter of the County’s CARES Act funds, $15 million, was allocated using the federal Title 1 formula which meant the funds were distributed in accordance to the share of students in poverty in each school within the school districts.”
But, while welcome, it could not make up for the gaping, systemic difference in funding.
Teachers Are Harder to Recruit
“Just as the pandemic has taken a toll on the academic achievement of students with lower incomes than their peers, the teacher shortage and insufficiency of state funding for lower-wealth school districts means students in high-poverty districts will continue to fall behind,” according to Children First.
Recovering learning loss won’t be made any easier with fewer teachers. School districts entered the 2021-22 school year with record high teacher resignations and too few newly trained teachers to take their place.
“National data indicates that 48 percent of school districts struggled to hire enough fulltime teachers, while 55 percent struggled to hire paraprofessionals, and 77 percent struggled to find substitute teachers, according to a 2021 EdWeek Research Center survey. Add to that challenge the fact that far fewer newly trained teachers are entering the field,” the report found.
“In fact, since the 201314 school year, Pennsylvania has seen a 42 percent decline in new teaching certificates and a 425 percent increase” in emergency teaching certificates being issued.
Now, take the problem of fewer graduates inclined to take up teaching
as a profession and mix in offering lower salaries than other wealthier districts, and it becomes quickly obvious the difficulties low-income school districts have in recruiting and retaining teachers.
“In Montgomery County, based on funds available for instruction, the gap between the district with the most and least resources is almost $193,000 per classroom (of 25 students). The schools with less funding will likely have to increase class sizes because they won’t have sufficient funds to hire new teachers, given the shortage,” according to Children First.
Falling Further Behind
The report concluded that “national research makes a compelling case that nearly every student will complete the 2021-22 school year behind due to the many months of virtual and regularly interrupted instruction. Before COVID struck, 35 percent of Montgomery County’s public school students were already unable to meet basic English and math targets. Worse yet, the very schools that educate the majority of these children are the schools with the least resources to help their students catch up.”
Ultimately, “there is no temporary solution to the learning loss for students in Montgomery County. One-time grants for tutoring to help students catch up are a short-term fix and will leave far too many future graduates unprepared for a realworld job or college,” the report’s authors wrote. “State funds to close the educational resource gap are urgently needed to solve the county’s root educational disparity.”
This year, fair funding advocates celebrated a historic increase in state education funding. Of the $1.8 billion statewide hike in school funding — the largest school funding increase in 10 years — Montgomery County will receive more than $33.7 million. And about one-third of that money will go to just two school districts — Norristown and Pottstown.
But while the timing may seem fortuitous given the impacts of COVID, the increase is not structural — meaning much of the increase is not embedded in Pennsylvania’s Fair Funding Formula. The formula was enacted in 2016 to steer more state funds to poorer districts in order to provide resources similar to wealthy districts, but the formula is not fully utilized by Harrisburg.
But rather than use its own formula to distribute all education funding, making it instantly “fair,” Harrisburg invented a whole new vehicle called “Level-Up” funding, to accelerate more state dollars going to underfunded schools.
But that funding is optional from year to year. This means that if Pennsylvania’s revenues drop in the next fiscal year or the new governor decides to cut educational funding in next year’s proposed budget, that one year of gains could evaporate and those under-privileged students may once again be without the support needed to make up for the learning loss COVID brought to the classroom.
The report’s authors urged action, writing: “The citizens of Montgomery County must unite and demand that state lawmakers deliver sufficient funds so that every school can afford to hire an ample supply of teachers, provide every student with a computer and, where necessary, free or affordable internet access. To achieve these goals, every state lawmaker should be on the record for supporting an end to the school funding crisis in the Commonwealth and supportive of a strategy to close the state’s $4.6 billion school funding deficit.”