The Pa. school funding decision was the culmination of this 83-year-old Philly lawyer’s life’s work

Michael Churchill, 83, has spent nearly his entire adult life working to build a more just world, from the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 onward.

Without a doubt, a highlight among those years of civil rights work came this month, he said, when a Commonwealth Court judge declared Pennsylvania’s system of funding public education unconstitutional. Churchill was a chief architect of the case, first filed in 2014 — but really, decades in the making.

When you ask Churchill an education-funding question, prepare to receive a master class. But he takes longer to answer why he’s spent his life the way he has.

“It was always just clear that if you really wanted to believe in the democratic values, you had to do something,” said Churchill. “You could not be a nation, a successful one, claiming one thing and then doing something else.”

Churchill’s involvement in questioning the fundamental fairness of Pennsylvania’s education funding system dates to 1991, when he represented community groups seeking to intervene in a school desegregation case: The Philadelphia School District suggested its plan to bus 14,000 students from racially isolated schools across the city to high-performing schools in the Northeast was an appropriate fix; Churchill and others disagreed.

“Why was the district not putting in sufficient resources in the racially isolated schools as compared to the others?” said Churchill, who led the Public Interest Law Center from 1976 to 2006 and still serves as “of counsel” — a key lawyer — there.

A judge agreed with the community groups in 1994, directing the district to come up with a plan to remedy the funding and academic inequalities, which it did. But though the school system’s enrollment grew dramatically in the 1990s, the state had no formula that spelled out a resulting increase in aid, leaving the school system unable to fulfill its promises.

Eventually, the Public Interest Law Center — with Churchill leading the charge — joined with city attorneys and the district to sue the state in 1997 alleging Pennsylvania failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for Philadelphia students.

As enrollment grew and inflation increased, poverty and needs also deepened. Churchill, who is both courtly and accessible in person, leans forward and smiles when he delves into the minutiae of 1990s school funding. No details are lost to him.

“I can still remember [then city solicitor] Joe Dworetzky and I putting together a table of increases in funding since 1991 — percentage increases, for the school district and the state. The school district was clearly not getting its fair share,” he said.

That case, known as Marrero for the first named plaintiffs, never made it to trial. (”It was a terrible opinion for many, many reasons. I actually wrote a chapter of a book about why it was so bad,” Churchill said.)

In the years between 1999, when Marrero was tossed out, and 2014, when the latest education lawsuit was filed, Churchill — who has also worked on significant cases related to housing, police misconduct, and employment discrimination — kept his eye on the education-funding ball with advocacy and sharp-eyed analysis, building coalitions, doing behind-the-scenes work to advance the cause. He worked to pull every lever to make legislators take up the funding question.

Other doors had shut, but “it’s not like Michael just walked away,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a Public Interest Law Center colleague. “He became a self-educated Ph.D. in school funding. He just became a technical expert that everyone would consult with.”

And though Philadelphia was the state’s largest district and among the most underfunded, Churchill saw clearly how it was not alone. Districts like Reading, Pottstown, Lancaster, Norristown, and York also got shortchanged; so did rural districts.

After former Gov. Tom Corbett cut $1 billion from state school aid in 2011, “parents from all over yelled and screamed, ‘What can we do? They are destroying the functioning of the schools,’” Churchill said. Statewide, 27,000 school employees were laid off, including teachers; programs were slashed. Schools closed.

“There were no options left in the state, in the political process,” said Churchill. “They forced our hand. We had no choice but to bring litigation.”

Six school systems, including the William Penn School District in Delaware County, were plaintiffs, as was the Pennsylvania NAACP and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools. The Philadelphia district itself, still under state control at the time the suit was filed, was not a plaintiff, but one Philadelphia parent was a petitioner. Along with Churchill and Urevick-Ackelsberg, lawyers from the Education Law Center worked on the case, as did Katrina Robson, a prominent litigator from O’Melveny who joined the case pro bono.

It took seven years for the case to be heard. Churchill turned 82 during the three-month trial, which began in November 2021.

“He’s 83 years old, and working around the clock,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg, who noted the number of emails he received from Churchill at 11:45 p.m. “For any abstract legal issue, on any subject, we say, ‘Let’s start by asking Michael.’ He’ll pull an anecdote from some footnote in a case from 1983. He is extraordinarily sharp.”

After nearly a year’s wait, Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s decision came on Feb. 7. Churchill often works from home, in Chester County, but as luck would have it, it was his day to work at the Law Center’s offices, across the street from City Hall. He was able to savor the 786-page decision with his colleagues around him, reading parts out loud, and people hanging on his words, colleagues said.

Jubelirer said there was “no rational basis” for the gaps between the education that high- and low-wealth districts provide Pennsylvania students.

It was a high-water mark for Churchill, who was born in the New York suburbs, moved to Philadelphia as a teenager in the 1950s, and earned undergraduate and law degrees at Harvard.

He initially thought he might want to become a journalist — Churchill wrote for the Harvard Crimson, and even witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a Washington Post reporter in 1963 — but eventually, the call to public service planted by his parents, including a city-planner father, won out.

Churchill worked at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and then at Ballard Spahr in the early part of his career. When Public Interest Law Center founder Ned Wolf asked for Churchill’s help, Churchill became pro bono counsel for the center’s first case, a housing discrimination suit on behalf of residents of the East Poplar neighborhood.

Along the way, his work was influenced by his wife, who spent years as a second-grade teacher in Philadelphia public schools; he saw firsthand the difference resources made for her students. (The couple have three grown children and grandchildren.)

Churchill joined the Law Center full time in 1976, as codirector, along with Thomas Gilhool. Nearly 50 years in, his vision has not dimmed. He’s no longer pursuing work on housing inequalities and gerrymandering; other colleagues have taken up the mantle.

“This is my main motivation now,” Churchill said of education funding. “I’m concentrating on this because if you can’t get education right, it’s hard to get other things right. We cannot afford to have two systems.”

And the work is far from over. It’s unclear whether state officials will appeal, but even if they don’t, Jubelirer’s decision does not spell out a fix to the system she found unconstitutional.

Churchill’s still game to work at it, a fact that makes his colleagues marvel.

“For someone who has fought this fight for so long, to keep fighting,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg, “there’s an inherent optimism in someone who’s willing to keep banging on the door.”