Wednesday’s blog addressed the case the PA Supreme Court is hearing over school funding. In April of 2015 the case was dismissed by Commonwealth Court based on the prior rulings of the PA Supreme Court on the topic. Commonwealth court’s majority decision cited the Supreme Court’s decision in noting that the PA Constitution “…does not confer an individual right upon each student to a particular level or quality of education, but, instead, imposes a constitutional duty upon the legislature to provide for the maintenance of a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the Commonwealth”.
It added “the only judicially manageable standard this court could adopt would be the rigid rule that each pupil must receive the same dollar expenditures”. That would be a difficult undertaking statewide–true either if it was directed by the judiciary or the legislature–and the districts in Allegheny County illustrate that.
Let’s look first at per pupil expenditures on instruction–in 2014-15 the average was $10,056. Let’s assume Pennsylvania was to say each district would have to spend $11,000 per-pupil on instruction. In order to have a rigid rule, seven districts in the county would have to reduce spending, with four of these (Wilkinsburg, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, and Fox Chapel) by more than $1,300 per pupil. Twenty two districts would have to increase spending by $1,300 or more per pupil. The state average per pupil instructional expense was $9,241 in 2014-15; if the rigid standard were $9,700 per pupil then 21 districts in the County would be required to reduce spending.
What if the standard was that the state had to give each district the same amount of revenue per pupil? That does not happen now due to aid ratios which give more money to districts with lower market value and personal income. But as we have pointed out before with local property taxation districts with large tax bases can raise a lot of money. Thus, despite the state giving more money to property tax poor districts on a per pupil basis those districts can easily be leapfrogged by local tax effort.
Look at districts in Allegheny County that receive almost identical amounts from the state. There was a $4 difference between state funding per pupil in East Allegheny ($6,842) and Brentwood ($6,838). Yet East Allegheny raised $4,290 more per pupil locally. There was a $29 difference between Northgate ($5,887) and Deer Lakes ($5,859). But Deer Lakes raised $671 more locally. In probably the only case of state and local funding similarity, Avonworth and Moon had a $44 difference is state revenue and a $45 in local funding.
As we pointed out in prior Briefs (here and here), unless the state is going to assume 100% of public school funding, end local school taxation, and then make a state level decision on what fair and equitable means (does each district get the identical amount per pupil? Or do places with lower market value and personal income get more as they did with the aid ratios?) it is hard to see how the Supreme Court could divert from the Commonwealth Court ruling.
