Shuttered libraries. Broken textbooks. Crumbling buildings. These are familiar experiences for students at Philly schools, as a feature in the last edition of The Merionite mentioned.
As terrible as the funding inequities highlighted in that article are, the reality of PA school funding is worse. For instance, it’s true that annually LMSD spends over $28,000 per student compared to about $15,000 in Philadelphia. However, these numbers ignore factors that should be considered: poverty, district sparsity, and other district characteristics.
Ignoring these factors can be problematic because it can lead to underestimating inequalities. The state’s funding formula takes these factors into account by taking a district’s Average Daily Membership (ADM), the total amount of students for whom the district is financially responsible, and applying multipliers for poverty, district sparsity, and other factors to adjust the ADM and get a Weighted Student Count. PA then analyzed districts that meet state standards, excluded high spending outliers, and found that the average spending per weighted student of these districts was $14,120. They set every district’s funding adequacy target at $14,120 times that district’s weighted student count. As recorded for PA’s most recent budget, Philadelphia was spending $10,667.29 per weighted student, compared to $22,930.27 in LMSD; we effectively have over twice the level of funding as Philadelphia, which you can’t see from the raw numbers.
As awful as this sounds, the worst aspect of PA’s current funding system is that there isn’t a plan to get every district to funding adequacy. The $5.4 Billion funding increase and timeline mentioned in the article refers to a bill, HB 2370. But something important is that HB 2370 didn’t pass into law; it passed the house, but not the Senate. PA did pass a budget that, for the first time in history, acknowledged that PA public schools are massively underfunded, but there were some key differences between this budget and HB 2370. The senate deflated the percentage of students in poverty by using census data to determine that percentage rather than data reported by school districts. This means that all students living in a district were taken into account when determining the poverty percentage, rather than just students attending public schools, who are disproportionately poor. As a result, districts’ adequacy targets were lower, lowering the total funding shortage from $5.4 Billion to $4.8 Billion.
Though this is a change from what HB 2370 proposed, the biggest of these changes is that the budget didn’t create a timeline in which to fill the entire funding adequacy gap. This means that every year will be another fight to get the next funding increase.
As these fights continue, advocacy is an integral part of achieving funding adequacy, as the previous article mentioned. Those who are interested should look into organizations and school clubs that are engaged in education funding advocacy and see how they can get involved. After all, the school funding system won’t change itself.
