Pa. just made a significant investment in public education. Why are advocates worried about it?

Public education advocates claimed a win in Pennsylvania’s new budget: a formal recognition by the state that schools need an additional $4.5 billion to adequately educate students.

But whether Pennsylvania will supply that money in the years to come — and whether it will be enough to fix the state’s unconstitutional school funding system — was an unresolved question.

While the deal signed by Democratic Gov. Shapiro on Thursday puts $500 million toward that $4.5 billion gap — winning applause from districts such as Philadelphia, which will get more than a quarter of that money — it whittled down the scope of what advocates said was needed by using a different measure of poverty than what Democrats had proposed, alarming some experts.

It also stretched out the timeline for how long it might take for the state to reach adequate school funding — from the seven years proposed by Democrats, to nine years — with no commitment to a funding plan in future years.

Here’s what to know about the education budget, and why some public education advocates are still concerned.

After the landmark Commonwealth Court ruling last year that found Pennsylvania has been shortchanging students in poorer school districts — which can’t raise as much money through property taxes to fund their schools as more affluent communities — advocates have pushed the state to calculate just how much funding is needed to provide students an adequate education.

An expert for the plaintiffs that brought the successful lawsuit calculated targets for adequate spending for every school district, based on what districts that meet state standards are spending, and the specific needs of each community’s student populations.

The deal passed Thursday requires the Pennsylvania Department of Education to calculate each district’s “adequacy gap.” Advocates parsing the budget language said it amounted to $4.5 billion in total.

Donna Cooper, executive director of the pro-public education advocacy group Children First, said the state’s recognition through law of what they’ve been arguing for decades — that students receive unequal and inadequate education based on their ZIP codes — is “really amazing.”

“We’re not arguing about that anymore,” she added.

What was missing Thursday was any longer-term plan to closing the gap. While House Democrats had passed a bill with a seven-year timeline, the budget deal ultimately agreed upon by lawmakers didn’t include any language binding the state in future years, as Republicans expressed concern about committing to a plan without knowing the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.

Lawyers who brought the successful school funding lawsuit — who warned earlier this week that they might go back to court over the lack of a long-term plan — said Thursday that the state’s constitution “requires more.”

“Students need public schools that provide the support they need to reach meaningful opportunities today, not someday in the far future,” the Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center said in a statement. “And the same budget legislation that admits the scope of the Commonwealth’s constitutional shortfall still leaves nearly 90% of that hole to be filled by some undefined date in the future, or not at all.”

The lack of a multiyear plan also drew pushback from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. While “I doubt anyone would have expected the General Assembly to address decades of inadequate funding in a single budget or two,” said Nathan Mains, the association’s CEO, school boards want “a commitment from the General Assembly that the state will continue investing more in public education and relieve the burden on so many communities to fund their local schools.”

Democrats defended the budget as a down payment toward meeting those needs.

“This is really historic,” said State Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Philadelphia), who chairs the House Appropriations committee. “Listen, I’m no millionaire, I’m no billionaire, so half a billion dollars is still a big number to me.”

In a late-night news conference Thursday, Shapiro called the education funding a “huge win” as he signed the new $47.6 billion budget — and said he’s committed to “building on that progress for many years to come.”

While the budget acknowledges a $4.5 billion adequacy gap, it’s less than the $5.1 billion Democrats had tallied in their proposal — the product of a change in the final language in how school district needs were calculated.

To assess how much money schools need, the budget formula takes into account a school district’s level of poverty; experts agree that poor students have greater needs and cost more to educate.

But while Democrats had used data that school districts report on low-income students, the method pushed by Republicans and ultimately adopted in the budget uses census estimates of community poverty.

Brooks Bowden, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said the American Community Survey measure is less accurate — it’s a yearly estimate, with a margin of error — than the data reported by districts, which are “built on multiple measures of hardship,” Bowden said. For instance, students are certified as low-income if they’re in the foster care system, or their household receives food stamps; districts report that data to the federal government to qualify for funding under the Title I program.

“There’s very strong regulations around ensuring those funds are allocated correctly and fairly,” Bowden said, adding that districts sometimes draw on the ACS estimates as part of their data. While the district data “isn’t perfect, it’s far better than using one flawed measure.”

Though some districts will see gains from the ACS measure, it will mean “pretty stunning losses” in funding for districts where the survey underrepresents poverty, Bowden said — noting that in some districts, particularly in rural parts of the state, the ACS measure is “more than 100% off” the poverty levels reported by districts.

In Philadelphia, the district reports 71% of students are low-income, while the ACS estimates about 55% of students fall in that category. (Another factor in the differing figures: the ACS estimates poverty for all students ages 5-17, not just the ones attending public schools.)

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) said Senate Republicans pushed to use the ACS measure because census data is used to drive out other education funds.

“We’ve put in this a degree of taxpayer protection,” Pittman added in floor remarks Thursday night. “There’s not smoke and mirrors here. There’s transparency and accountability.”

Overall, the budget includes a more than $1 billion increase for K-12 schools: $525 million to bring underfunded districts closer to adequacy, and reimburse high-taxing districts; $285 million distributed among all school districts; and $93 million distributed among all districts for special education.

Districts are also slated to get $134 million as a result of changes around cyber charters — which are funded by school districts, based on enrollment and what districts spend per student. The budget establishes a $100 million reimbursement fund for districts, and saves them additional money by curbing cyber charter tuition rates for special education students.

But it doesn’t include the flat $8,000 tuition rate for cyber students that was sought by districts, which currently spend between $8,600 and $26,000, depending on the district’s per-pupil spending.

Describing the budget as falling “short of transformational reform,” Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg said in a statement that “the wild west of underregulated cyber charters also went untouched.”

Still, “we are relieved to see a strong one-year increase for the School District of Philadelphia,” Steinberg said.

The district will receive an additional $231.9 million — crucial as federal COVID relief funds run out, said Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.

“This budget takes the first step toward closing the adequacy gap... and ensuring that students in Philadelphia have the same access to high-quality public education as their peers in Lower Merion,” Watlington said. The money will allow the state’s largest school system to prioritize school safety, facility improvements and accelerating learning gains, he said.