This commentary was written by a retired superintendent of schools.
Pennsylvania’s Tragic Betrayal of its Public Schools
By Joseph Batory, Former Superintendent of Schools, Upper Darby School District, Drexel Hill, PA
With regard to the inadequate funding of Philadelphia Public Schools, the city’s politicians have been and continue to lacking in political courage and moral fiber. Far too many of them are much too self-serving and most of them do not even understand what the fiscal insanity that continues to cripple the schools and the children of their city.
Likewise, the recent array of superintendents has each been far too meek and without the commitment to confront the system’s financial deficiencies.
But the worst villain of all has been the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the early 1990’s, Pennsylvania government consciously destroyed its Equalized Subsidy for Basic Education (ESBE) formula. That method of State funding once used to bridge the wide gaps between poorer and more affluent school districts. The ESBE formula each year had utilized factors of community wealth and pupil population to drive out annual subsidies to school systems that were both objective and fair. Unfortunately, the growing costs of this ESBE formula to the state budget caused its ultimate demise as cowardly politicians prioritized re-election agendas instead of the common good.
Since the removal of the ESBE formula by the Pennsylvania legislature, billions of dollars have been denied to school districts across the Commonwealth.
When the ESBE formula was dropped, many impoverished school systems received only a fraction of what the ESBE formula would have generated. Without a funding formula, this has gone on year after year. This has created havoc at the local level.
State politicians have also violated the Pennsylvania Constitution which mandates that the Commonwealth “maintain and support a thorough and efficient system of public education” and they’ve been in denial for many years like they had no part in this incompetency.
Over the years, there have been numerous and diverse education coalitions across Pennsylvania that rose up against the betrayal of schools and children by a bipartisan political establishment without conscience.
Tragically, unlike many other states nationally, Pennsylvania courts—whether as a matter of political control or apathy— have consistently dismissed challenges to the Commonwealth’s obvious inadequate funding of schools. Almost all states pay a larger percentage of overall public education costs than Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth’s approximate rank is 45 out of 50 in the nation on this measure. On average, other states contribute 47% of total education funding, but in 2006 (sadly…the most recent statistics available), Pennsylvania contributed only 36% (National Center for Education Statistics) as its share of public education funding statewide. To counter this reality, Harrisburg’s political “spin doctors” work overtime to obfuscate the issues, assassinate dissenters and confuse the public.
The last Philadelphia superintendent who tried to fight for the rights of the city’s children was David Hornbeck. He publicly decried the State’s lack of any adequate financial commitment to its public schools. For daring to do this, he was politically executed and run out of office. Small wonder that his superintendent successors just ran with whatever funds the political establishment granted them rather than advocating the educational needs of school children.
As a superintendent of schools during the 1990’s in nearby Upper Darby, I also fought with State politicians of both parties daring to suggest publicly that they were ignoring their Constitutional responsibility and hurting the neediest schools and children via insufficient school funding. Most of these politicians denied any funding inadequacies regularly telling constituents that school districts like Philadelphia and my District in Upper Darby had plenty of money.
Ironically, on November 15, 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer, published a page one independent report from the GoodSchoolsPa organization validating the terrible betrayal of Pennsylvania’s public schools and the children they serve for a long period of years by its state politicians.
Here are some of the findings of that study : Pennsylvania was currently underfunding public education by $4.8 billion. And Pennsylvania ranked 45th among the 50 states in the percentage of school funding that comes from the State. This analysis noted that to correct the situation by equalizing what is spent for each student in Pennsylvania and allowing the state’s poorer public schools to just “catch up” to the statewide adequate cost per pupil, many school districts in Pennsylvania were entitled to money. In that context, Philadelphia’s public schools were owed $1 billion from the state and Upper Darby (my old school district) was entitled to $54 million.
Hard to believe things could get any worse. But now we have the tyrannical reign of Governor Tom Corbett. The Harrisburg political buzzword of “fiscal responsibility” is an absurd concept in the context of the education our young people. Money has always mattered in business and industry and government whenever America has been serious about anything! Saving a dollar now on underfunding schools in Pennsylvania will very likely result in spending exponentially more dollars in the future when a more undereducated population is contributing less to the economy and/or filling up the prisons. Governor Corbett’s theoretically conservative policy can be more accurately described as fiscal irresponsibility.
The Commonwealth’s political betrayal of public schools is a national disgrace. It is a legacy of infamy!
