UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A ruling by a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge in early February that declared Pennsylvania’s K-12 school funding system unconstitutional is an opportunity to set the stage for students from lower-wealth communities to succeed academically, according to Penn State College of Education researchers who participated in the case.

In the case, William Penn School District et al. v. PA Department of Education et al., filed in 2014 by multiple school districts, parents and advocacy groups, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer ruled that the state’s public education system is unconstitutional due to its inequitable and inadequate funding across districts.

For several years, the state released data on how much additional funding K-12 school districts needed to reach adequacy targets defined in Pennsylvania’s own School Code. The School Code’s adequacy targets were based on the results of a 2007 educational cost study commissioned by lawmakers.

Although the state stopped publicly releasing data on adequacy shortfalls in 2010-11, Matthew Kelly, assistant professor of education (educational leadership) at Penn State, provided updated estimates for recent school years. He calculated that districts, overall, had $4.6 billion less than they needed to reach their adequacy targets.

Kelly served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs were challenging the fairness of Pennsylvania’s school funding system during the trial, which ended last year. In the expert report he provided, he emphasized that although expectations the state has for school districts have increased over time, the state has increasingly turned toward local taxes to pay for its schools. According to federal data, Pennsylvania is more reliant on local taxes for funding than most other states. In 2016-17, for example, only seven states were more reliant on local taxes to fund their schools than Pennsylvania. As a result, Kelly said, Pennsylvania has one of the country's largest spending gaps between wealthy and poor districts, with the poorest quintile spending about $12,000 per student, while the wealthiest spend about $20,000 per student.

“If we look at the bulk of educational spending in Pennsylvania, a very large share is coming from local taxes — taxes on real estate and income,” Kelly said. “That taxable wealth is unevenly distributed across districts. If you look across states in the country, and where Pennsylvania ranks for the share of funding that comes from the state — we end up being ranked near the bottom. In all of those other states, more money is coming from state sources not as contingent on how local wealth is distributed across school districts. Pennsylvania is really an outlier in the extent to which the state is not providing assistance to districts that are unable to generate more revenue on their own.”

Ed Fuller, associate professor of education (educational leadership) at Penn State, has served as an expert witness in several school funding cases — in Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Delaware. While he did not testify for the Pennsylvania school funding case, he wrote an expert witness report, reviewed other expert witness reports, provided data to the lawyers for cross-examinations, and discussed strategy with the lawyers. The points that Fuller emphasized centered on the impact of inequitable school funding on students and their access to resources such as school counselors, nurses and librarians. His research has shown that many schools in Pennsylvania do not employ full-time counselors. In particular, he said, students in underfunded school districts have far less access to school counselors than students in wealthy districts.

According to Fuller, the state finance cases stem from major Supreme Court cases of the 20th century. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. However, in Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District (1973), the Supreme Court stated that under the federal constitution, education was not a fundamental right. This meant such cases must be fought at the state level, Fuller said.

“Are we providing students with adequate resources regardless of race?” said Fuller. “Every student deserves a quality education, and we’re fighting that in pretty much every state.”

In the U.S., according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, state and local governments provide the vast majority of funding for K-12 education — 93% of all school funding. The federal government provides support for K-12 education through specific grant programs administered by the states to school districts. Federal funds made up just $57.8 billion or 7% of total education funding during the 2019–20 school year; federal dollars supplement state resources by narrowing funding gaps for at-risk students.

According to Kelly, the funding that Pennsylvania provides directly from the commonwealth for this purpose is distributed “unequally, inefficiently and, over the long run, irrationally.” In 2018-19, he stated in his expert report, the commonwealth provided over $7 billion in basic education funding and special education funding directly to school districts.

Although the commonwealth created a basic education funding formula and a special education funding formula to distribute these funds in relation to the financial need of school districts, Pennsylvania’s formula only applies to “new funding.” Therefore, according to Kelly, the vast majority of funding is subject to Pennsylvania’s “hold harmless” provision, which permanently locks in the historic underfunding of certain districts, regardless of any changes in district enrollment, costs or need. He noted that only 8.84% of basic education funding provided to school districts was distributed through the commonwealth’s formula and only 9.79% of state special education funding was distributed through the state’s special education formula. The rest of the funds were subject to “hold harmless” and not distributed.

“Even if all the dollars are distributed fairly through that formula, it wouldn’t address the issue that not enough dollars are being put in,” said Kelly. “That pie is not being split in a rational way. Even if it was, it’s not going to change the fact that the pie is too small.”

Kelly said he estimates, based on Pennsylvania’s own School Code requirements for adequacy, that an additional $4.6 billion investment would be needed from the state to help K-12 school districts reach adequate funding targets.