Andrew Lewis of the Commonwealth Foundation says Pennsylvania\u2019s public education is \u201canything but adequate\u201d (\u201cPa. public education is anything but adequate,\u201d Aug. 23). On one point, we agree: Too many Pennsylvania kids still don\u2019t have what they need to reach their full potential. But then Lewis takes a wrong turn, arguing we already spend too much and the fix is to route tax dollars into private-school vouchers with no strings attached.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not a solution. It\u2019s an excuse to abandon the work Pennsylvania has only just begun.<\/p>\n
But merely looking at the total amount spent on education obscures the real problem. Pennsylvania ranks near the bottom nationally in the state\u2019s share of school funding, forcing low-wealth communities to rely on local property taxes that don\u2019t stretch far enough.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly why, in 2023, the Commonwealth Court ruled our funding system unconstitutional \u2014 not because we spend too much, but because a child\u2019s ZIP code still determines the quality of their education. It shouldn\u2019t take a court case to move Harrisburg to do right by our kids. But it did.<\/p>\n
Lewis disingenuously complains adequacy dollars are concentrated in a handful of districts by lumping a district with 200,000 kids in with a district with 1,000, and feigning shock that the larger districts get more funding on an absolute basis. And he does so despite suggesting (wrongly) the adequacy formula is not based on \u201chow many students (districts) serve.\u201d This fun with numbers obscures the reality: On a per-student amount, under the adequacy formula, small districts and big districts get treated exactly the same.<\/p>\n
He also suggests eliminating hold harmless, the long-standing guarantee that no school district gets less state funding than it received the year before, even when its enrollment dips. This may sound good to Lewis\u2019 Harrisburg think tank, but it would financially devastate school districts in places like Indiana, Washington and Allegheny counties.<\/p>\n
All the while, he also claims the money isn\u2019t working. But the adequacy supplement is barely three years old, and you can\u2019t pin pandemic-era test scores and decades of underfunding on investments that only began in 2024. And the early results are already clear and tangible. For example, Chambersburg cut its counselor-to-student ratio nearly in half and saw a 40% drop in discipline incidents. Lehighton shrank class sizes and put a social worker in every building. Coatesville reopened five shuttered elementary libraries.<\/p>\n
Districts reported exactly how every dollar was spent, the very accountability Lewis claims is missing.<\/p>\n
Lewis claims to be standing up for students with disabilities, then he turns around and prescribes a federal voucher scheme that offers those very kids nothing. With vouchers, private schools have the \u201cchoice,\u201d not families. They can, and do, turn away students with disabilities, and they have no legal obligation to serve them. The rights that protect a child with a disability are ones parents can actually rely on in the public schools.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, those private schools answer to no one: no transparency, no academic standards, no accountability. Funny how the accountability Lewis demands of public schools disappears the moment the money falls into private schools\u2019 coffers.<\/p>\n
Nine in 10 Pennsylvania kids attend public schools. Lawmakers in both parties made a promise to close the funding gap the court identified. Pennsylvania has begun to do that, and students are already benefiting.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s not walk away from what\u2019s working. Let\u2019s finish that job.<\/p>\n
Susan Spicka is executive director of Education Voters of PA. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrew Lewis of the Commonwealth Foundation says Pennsylvania\u2019s public education is \u201canything but adequate\u201d (\u201cPa. public education is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-275334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}