See how much money your school district has for students
Most school districts in Pennsylvania don’t have enough money to meet state standards.
This year's landmark school funding decision was clear: Pennsylvania's way of paying for public education isn't working.
Less evident is how Pennsylvania's school funding actually works — and why so many schools are underfunded. Despite a 2016 state funding formula meant to level the playing field, gaps remain between rich and poor districts. And according to testimony presented in the court case, more than 80% of districts don’t have enough money to educate their students well.
To understand the problems, let’s look at districts with very different funding levels. Start by selecting any Pennsylvania school district you want:
Enter a district
school-district-2 School District is funded . It ranks pupil-spend-rank in per-student spending out of 499 districts in Pennsylvania.
Now we’ll explain how that funding was determined – by comparing your district-with-wp-descriptor with comparison-districts .
Let’s first see how much the school districts need. The state starts with a minimum amount districts must spend per student to provide an adequate education.
But some students need more resources. For example, William Penn has a higher share of students in poverty (22%), whose educational needs cost more to address, than Methacton (4.3%).
Overall, school-district needs more-or-less-target william-penn-or-methacton . About prop of school-district-2 ’s students are in poverty.
To meet their funding needs, districts start with property taxes, which make up most of their local revenue. Some districts have a wealthier property base they can tax, so these revenues vary significantly.
State funding is meant to even out this imbalance by sending more money to needier districts. In theory, this reduces the funding gap between William Penn and Methacton. state-dynamic-text
In practice, only a portion of state funding is distributed that way. The rest is held at 2014 funding levels, benefitting and-district at the expense of and-district-2
After accounting for smaller amounts of other revenue, such as federal money, and-district-3 still fell short of sing-plural-pronoun needs, joining underfunded-no other underfunded districts.
Here’s why potentially-your-school-district William Penn verbs losing out.
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William Penn falling short in raising local revenue
William Penn taxes its residents at 1.7 times the rate of Methacton. In fact, it has the second-highest tax rate in the state.
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“We’re really maxed out on that end,” said William Penn Superintendent Eric Becoats.
Yet it still brings in less revenue than Methacton.
That’s because the properties within William Penn’s six boroughs of Aldan, Colwyn, Darby, East Lansdowne, Lansdowne, and Yeadon aren’t worth as much as those in Methacton’s Lower Providence and Worcester. Even a tax rate nearly two times as high as Methacton's can't offset the difference in wealth.
William Penn is far from alone in experiencing this problem. The lowest-wealth school districts in the state tax at higher rates than the wealthiest ones and still can’t close the gap. Black and Hispanic students are concentrated in those districts.
school-district is wealthier-or-poorer of the state's 499 school districts.
White students comprise white-share of the 2019-enrollment-to-use students in this district’s schools, Black students black-share , Hispanic students hisp-share , and Asian students asian-share .
The district ranks tax-rank in its tax rate and local-revenue-rank in local revenue raised per student.
William Penn to benefit from the state’s funding formula
Pennsylvania tried to correct for inequity in district wealth, and better reflect districts’ needs, when it adopted a new funding formula in 2016.
The state assesses districts’ local revenue: how much money they could raise, depending on their wealth, and how much they’re actually taxing residents. And it looks at how many students they have, and how vulnerable those students are. For instance, English language learners and students living in poverty require more services, meaning their districts warrant additional funding.
These calculations can result in significant shifts compared to what a district was receiving before 2016.
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In 2019, school-district received more-or-less-per-student per student in its state formula allocation than most districts in the state. percentile-phrase less per student than school-district-2 does.
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William Penn losing out because Harrisburg withholds money from some districts
The formula’s impact has been limited.
When originally introduced, the formula presented a dilemma for lawmakers: If you give a greater share of state money to some districts — such as those with many students in poverty — you have to take some away from others.
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Under the formula, most districts would have received less money than they had previously.
So lawmakers made a promise: No district would receive less than it did in 2014-15, a policy called “hold harmless.” The formula would only apply to increases in education funding after that threshold was met.
“It was a simple political decision,” said Rep. Mike Sturla (D., Lancaster), who was on the commission that produced the formula.
Because of the hold harmless policy, only 10% of state funding in 2019 was actually distributed through the funding formula. That means most state funding is still tied to old enrollment numbers, even if they’ve since grown or shrunk. Four out of five Black or Latino students in district schools lose out because of the policy.
In 2019, school-district lost-gained because of the state’s hold harmless policy.
Closing the gap could require billions of dollars
Even applying the formula to the entire state allocation wouldn’t give all school districts what they need.
Overall, districts are falling short by a combined $4.6 billion in what’s needed to provide children an adequate education, according to targets no longer enforced by the state.
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A shortfall has real repercussions. William Penn can’t afford music, art, and physical education teachers at each of its elementary schools and doesn’t have instructional assistants to lower class sizes in kindergarten through third grades — crucial years for students learning to read.
There are “basic resources that our students should have in place that we aren't able to provide to them,” said Becoats, the superintendent.
school-district shortfall-dynamic-text ranks-in-shortfall-or-had-no-shortfall
Schools that do meet their thresholds still may not have enough to cover all their costs: The minimum costs per student were established in 2008 and don’t take into account spending on special education, for instance. Districts have borne an increasing share of those costs for a growing number of special education students over the past decade.
In deeming the funding system broken, the Commonwealth Court has ordered lawmakers to find a solution.
The Pennsylvania Constitution imposes “an obligation to provide a system of public education that does not discriminate against students based on the level of income and value of taxable property in their school districts,” Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer wrote in her decision.
Methodology
The Inquirer obtained data from Matthew Gardner Kelly, an education professor at Pennsylvania State University who was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the school funding trial. That data included calculations of each district’s “adequacy targets” for the 2019-20 school year under state law, as well as actual spending toward those targets. Both the target and the actual spending numbers don’t include all of a district’s expenses; for instance, the measures don’t include any money dedicated toward student transportation, or construction and improvements. They focus on spending that is more directly tied to student education. Districts are considered underfunded if they spend less than their adequacy target. (Bryn Athyn, which has no public schools of its own, was excluded from this analysis.)
Those adequacy targets are imperfect. In its ruling, the Commonwealth Court said it was “not convinced” that the targets were accurate measures, in part because the study that produced them was conducted in 2007. The Inquirer used them because they represent Pennsylvania’s only effort to calculate what school districts need; at the time, lawmakers of both parties supported their adoption into state law.
The Inquirer analysis used the 2019-20 school year because it is the last year before the disruption of the COVID pandemic and a temporary surge in federal relief funds. Analysis for the 2019-20 school year was also presented in the school funding lawsuit.
The analysis assumes the shares of a district’s expenditures coming from local, state and other sources match the shares of revenue provided by those sources.
The Inquirer analyzed Basic Education Funding files to determine district wealth, enrollment, demographic factors, and hold harmless effects. Per student estimates consider all students that districts are financially responsible for, whether those students attend charter schools or not.
Data on race were sourced from district Fast Fact files published by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. They include only students enrolled in district schools; they do not include charter school students.
Data on students in poverty were sourced from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates Program. These numbers include charter school students and private school students.
Equalized mills rates, referred to here as tax rates, come from the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Annual Financial Report Data.
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Staff Contributors
- Reporting: Maddie Hanna, Kasturi Pananjady
- Designing and Development: Jasen Lo
- Illustration: J.P. Flexner
- Editing: Cathy Rubin, Jonathan Lai, Sam Morris
- Digital Editing: Felicia Gans Sobey, Patricia Madej
- Social Editing: Erin Gavle
- Quality Assurance Testing: Elena Nova, Ksenia Belyaeva
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