This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.
A court decision requiring Pennsylvania lawmakers to make the funding system for public schools more equitable is front and center in this year’s budget negotiations, but the issue will not be resolved by the looming deadline.
Commonwealth Court ruled in February that the current school funding scheme is unconstitutional, but did not prescribe a solution, leaving it up to lawmakers to find an answer.
The budget has a deadline of June 30, and while some lawmakers hope to include extra education funding in deference to the court’s ruling, talks over a larger education overhaul are expected to last much longer.
The Democrats who newly control the state House are pushing for a large funding increase, and also want to boost money specifically earmarked for the poorest districts.
Republicans are reluctant to spend down the commonwealth’s multibillion budget surplus, citing concerns about a possible economic downturn. Many also say they want any school overhaul to include more publicly funded scholarships for students to attend private or charter schools, a policy that many Democrats argue weakens public schools.
The need for big changes to the school funding scheme comes courtesy of Commonwealth Court, which ruled in February that the current approach is unconstitutional because it creates lopsided outcomes in which wealthier districts get more resources and poorer districts can’t properly educate children.
The judge didn’t prescribe a solution, leaving it up to lawmakers to figure it out themselves.
The numbers involved are big and highly contested among lawmakers and interest groups. Public education advocates have argued it’ll take at least a few billion dollars in new funding to satisfy the conditions of the ruling, on top of the $7.9 billion Pennsylvania spent on basic education this fiscal year.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro or GOP legislative leadership could still appeal the case to the state Supreme Court. While GOP leaders haven’t said what they plan to do, Spotlight PA has learned Shapiro won’t appeal. And earlier this year, the governor said he expects his Republican colleagues will let the ruling stand as well.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that if the ruling stands, some kind of big overhaul of education funding will be necessary.
The question before them this year is: How should the commonwealth be planning for that change?
Dollars, cents, and school choice
Pennsylvania uses two different formulas to determine how much money goes to each school district.
One is generally seen as outdated and unfair because it doles out cash based on 30-year-old enrollment numbers, which means it routes relatively more money to shrinking districts and less to ones that have grown in recent decades, and doesn’t account for factors like student poverty. The other is considered to be more responsive to districts’ needs, but it’s only used for funding that has been added to the budget since 2016.
Once that state money is allocated, districts are then left to pad out much of their budgets through property taxes, which vary widely and tend to disproportionately burden poor areas.
The advocacy groups that brought the case decided by Commonwealth Court have argued that much more funding is needed to make education outcomes fairer, and that the state must also rethink its scheme for distributing those dollars.
Sharon Ward, a policy advisor with the Education Law Center, which represented plaintiffs in the case, said not all of that needs to change this year. Her organization is pushing for this budget to be a starting point.
“We have always said that it was important to make a significant down payment this year in order to respond to the judge’s decision,” she told Spotlight PA, “and to use the next couple of months to do the planning for an overhaul of the school funding system so that it meets constitutional muster.”
The question of how much money the commonwealth should be spending this year undergirds all discussions about education funding.
In his initial budget proposal, Shapiro pitched a roughly billion-dollar increase to education funding over last year’s, including $567 million more for basic public school education — about an 8% bump that slightly outpaces inflation. His plan would put hundreds of millions more dollars into things like special education and mental health programs, but wouldn’t increase funding to the commonwealth’s Level Up program, which routes money specifically to the poorest districts.
At the time, education advocates called Shapiro’s plan disappointing, saying it was not the major funding increase that Commonwealth Court had ordered.
State House Democrats, who control their chamber by a single seat, advanced their own budget plan last week. It largely matches Shapiro’s pitch while making significant additions to the education budget.
The proposal would add about $900 million to Shapiro’s total spend, with most of the addition going to schools and related expenses. That includes an additional $225 million earmarked for Level Up.
“We know we’re going to need to invest a significant number in education as a result of the lawsuit in the next, you know, X number of budgets,” said state Rep. Peter Schweyer (D., Lehigh), who chairs the House Education Committee. “So every dollar that we’re investing in education today will make it easier for us to get to the court-ordered goal of adequacy and equity tomorrow.”
Schweyer was “a little surprised” that Shapiro didn’t include more money for Level Up in his initial proposal, since that program was started as an acknowledgment of the district-by-district inequity that prompted the lawsuit.
But, Schweyer added, Shapiro “very clearly was applauding our improvement over his budget. So, you know, I think we’re all very much on the same page about it.”
Republicans remain on a different page.