• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Initiative Goes After More Support, State Funds for Schools

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 2--A statewide campaign aimed at giving struggling students more classroom support and directing more state money to 80 percent of all school districts was launched yesterday with the release of two reports.

The Education Law Center, a legal aid and advocacy group based in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, said it would use the two reports to back up its Closing the Gaps initiative.

Recent moves by Gov. Rendell and the legislature to look at improving funding equity and academic standards have encouraged law center officials.

They hope the campaign will "convince other powerful organizations in the state that this is a window of opportunity; that changes can be made this year," said Sandy Zelno, a leader of the Pennsylvania School Reform Network, a law center affiliate.

The first report calls for more school funding, more parent involvement in schools, giving teachers more training, learning from successful examples, and making sure that school boards operate better.

Titled "Making Progress, But Miles to Go," the report said that although Pennsylvania students overall are steadily improving their scores on state No Child Left Behind achievement tests, "student performance has actually fallen or shown very slow change in nearly one-third of all districts."

There are even larger performance gaps overall for African American, Hispanic, low-income, special-education and limited-English students.

For example, though many school districts have made significant progress in achievement among African Americans, the report said, on average, only 25 percent met state standards in math and 35 percent made the grade in reading in 2003-04. That compares with an average success rate for all state students of 54 percent in math and 64 percent in reading.

The second report, called "Shortchanging Our Children, Opportunity Gaps in Pennsylvania Public Schools," establishes what it calls a "successful schools budget" for the state's 501 school districts. It would be based on the median 2002-03 per-pupil expenditure of the most successful 58 districts in the state -- $8,740 -- adjusted for some special circumstances, such as a high poverty rate. Those 58 districts already meet the No Child Left Behind standards that all schools are expected to achieve by 2008.

Only 20 percent of Pennsylvania school districts spend at least what the law center figures is the minimum per-pupil "successful schools budget," the report said.

If a district's per-pupil shortfall is multiplied by 25 to approximate the spending difference for a whole classroom, about 40 percent of districts had an "opportunity deficit" of $40,000 or higher for the average classroom.

In 2002-03, high-spending school districts spent more than twice as much as lower-spending ones. For example, the Huntingdon Area School District, in central Pennsylvania, spent $7,646 per student, the report said, while the Lower Merion School District in Montgomery County spent $17,261 per student.

"This is not just an urban problem or a rural problem -- it affects communities throughout Pennsylvania," said law center spokesman Baruch Kintisch. "For 80 percent not to meet that standard is outrageous. We need to take steps to close that gap."

The report said that funding changes must come mostly from the state legislature and pointed out that a recent Education Week magazine report lists Pennsylvania as second to last in the United States in percentage of education funding coming from the state.

Kintisch said that the law center plans to launch a series of forums and publicity drives in support of education initiatives and legislation, starting this fall. It has formed a partnership with local education reform organizations and with other state education-advocacy groups, including Good Schools Pennsylvania and the Education policy and Leadership Center, he said.

The debate around the use of gaming revenues for property tax relief and initiatives like the use of state education block grants to target needier school districts with more funding have paved the way for change, Kintisch said.

"We hope that the need for reform will be an issue in the [2006] elections -- that the General Assembly and the candidates for governor will be talking about closing the gaps and putting forward legislation," he said.

For more information:

The Education Law Center's reports on the "achievement gap" and the "opportunity gap" are on the center's Web site: www.elc-pa.org/schoolreports/index.html

-----

To see more of The Philadelphia Inquirer, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.philly.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

More News in this Category