Pa. Education Report: Equity Meets Its Math

By Jeff Hawkes

Decades of decline Poverty adjustment

You drop off the car for an inspection and wait for the phone call.

You know the call. It’s the one in which the service manager says, “We found a couple of problems.”

If you’re like me, you don’t understand half the stuff the guy says about what’s wrong with the car. You just want to know what it’s going to cost.

Pennsylvania got that kind of call Wednesday. A consultant for the state Board of Education issued a report documenting what it would cost if every public school student was provided a quality education.

The cost? It’s $21.9 billion, $4.6 billion above current spending.

Of course, paying for such an increase would require drastic measures. Anyone up for a 9 percent sales tax?

Before Wednesday, Pennsylvania policymakers merrily imposed performance standards on schools without knowing the cost of compliance. For schools it was like being made to cross the ocean in a plane with a broken fuel gauge.

Maybe I’m cynical, but I believe many state lawmakers and past governors didn’t mind living in ignorance of what a quality education costs.

They’d throw a little extra money into the education budget so they could tell constituents, “Look, I got more money for your school.”

There’s a difference between more money and enough money. With increases from the state not keeping pace with need, school boards cut programs and raised property taxes.

A measure of how little the Legislature cares about public education is this: The state share of school funding has fallen from 55 percent in 1974 to 36 percent today.

And you wonder why your school taxes increase.

In preparing the “costing-out” study issued Wednesday, a consultant used four methods to calculate the cost of providing every student the opportunity to achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The long and short of the study is $12,057 per pupil is needed.

Pennsylvania comes late to the idea of “costing out” education. Similar studies have been done in 38 other states since 1991.

Pennsylvania’s delay in facing up to the costs of adequately preparing every child for success has resulted in jaw-dropping differences in spending across the state.

The statewide average in 2005-06 was $9,512 per pupil, but a well- to-do district near Philadelphia spent $17,184 while an Erie County district spent $6,805. Such disparity in public spending does not reflect well on democracy.

Of Pennsylvania’s 501 school districts, only 27 have sufficient revenue from state and local sources to offer all students a quality education, the study finds.

None of those districts is in Lancaster County.

School districts aren’t created equal. Some, such as School District of Lancaster, have a preponderance of students who come from low-income households, are learning English or have learning disabilities.

It costs more to get those students up to speed. The costing-out study takes into account how needs vary among districts and estimates costs accordingly.

It says the average cost of properly educating Lancaster’s students would be $14,904 per pupil compared to $10,845 in Manheim Township schools, which serve fewer impoverished students. The districts spent $9,878 and $8,607, respectively.

The numbers in the costing-out study add up to a crisis decades in the making. The study creates “an unprecedented moment,” said Ron Cowell, of Harrisburg-based The Education Policy and Leadership Center, because maybe, just maybe, a majority of lawmakers will come together around solutions.

Pennsylvania, the State of Independence, emerged on Wednesday from a state of ignorance.

Now we’ll find out if knowledge is power.

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com

(c) 2007 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.