OUR OPINION: The Right Way To Fund Philadelphia’s Schools

Are Pennsylvania taxpayers doing their fair share to fund Philadelphia schools?

Philadelphia’s major challenge is in public education. Fixing our underfunded, resource-starved schools is a huge and complex task that must be pursued on many fronts. We hope our city’s leaders will start to work on them now, quietly, during the holiday season, so that they can hit the ground running on New Year’s Day. (Well, on Jan. 2; let the Mummers hit the ground first.)

One front is in Harrisburg, in the General Assembly. The key here is to adopt a fair and effective funding formula by which state support for schools can be mandated predictably, year after year. Right now Pennsylvania is one of the few states that have no such formula. The result is state spending on education can fluctuate wildly from budget to budget.

Schooling, however, is a long-term project that requires consistent planning and consistent spending. You can’t give a child textbooks in 4^th grade, no textbooks in 5^th grade, laptops in 6^th grade, chalkboards in 7^th grade.

PENNA. state government woefully underfunds its school systems. Here is the national average ratio of state to local funding … and below is Penna.’s ratio. Graphs courtesy of Our City Our Schools

To its credit, the General Assembly admits the problem exists. It has appointed a committee to study the details of a funding formula.

Fortunately, this problem is statewide and potentially bipartisan. Poor rural districts that vote Republican also suffer. But Philadelphia, the largest school district in the commonwealth, suffers most. It has a high concentration of poor people.

Poor people, by definition, cannot tax themselves to pay for all the professional services they need. They cannot fund their own engineers, their own surgeons or their own teachers.

So the outcome our city is looking for from a funding formula is greatly increased support by statewide taxpayers.

That will take some logrolling. And the city’s largely Democratic delegation is at a disadvantage, given both the House and Senate will be firmly under conservative Republican control next year.

Our Senators and Representatives will need to make shrewd, effective alliances across the aisle starting with the beginning of the session. Developing a funding formula requires massive amounts of study and negotiation. Likely it will not be completed by next September, when the School District of Philadelphia will begin yet another underfunded academic year.

The sooner it is finished, though – and finished to Philadelphia’s satisfaction – the sooner the city’s worried educators and parents can move out of crisis mode and concentrate instead on making tangible gains for our children.

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