On the PA School Funding Lawsuit: Don’t Change the Subject
Originally published in the PA Capital-Star, August 11, 2021 In September, a group of students and school districts will make a case in state court that Pennsylvania is not meeting its constitutional responsibility to give every student an adequate and equitable education. The conservative Commonwealth Foundation, a Harrisburg think-tank, has called the funding lawsuit misguided. But its analysis doesn’t address the critical question of the gap between what schools spend and what they should spend according to adequacy standards written into state law. Instead, it changes the subject and presents data about other questions, tangentially related to the fundamental question at hand. The lawsuit is not about how much money is spent per student in Pennsylvania on average because a high level of spending could, and does, hide vast disparities between school districts. Those disparities arise because the bulk of school funding comes from local sources. Wealthy districts raise far… Continue reading