Issues with scarce budgets and troubled urban schools aren’t new, and they exist all over the country. In an article published in The Atlantic in 1954, Henry I. Willett attempted to answer the question of whether or not public schools cost too much by saying, “The amount spent for educational purposes as compared with amounts spent for many other items and services, including luxuries, would indicate that the importance of education in our democracy is not yet realized: and the hour is growing late.”
In Pennsylvania, the crisis is particularly acute. The state’s former governor stripped the education budget significantly. In the years since, schools have shuttered, teachers have been fired, and the schools that remain are existing on bare-bones budgets. Earlier this year, two children died after getting sick at district schools where no nurses were on duty due to budget reductions. Pennsylvania is also one of the only states in the country that hasn’t had a specific formula in place for distributing government aid to its districts. That’s left lots of room for partisan politics and funding bias.
Funding Per Student, by Race and Poverty Level
This year, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf—who took office in January—proposed increasing education funding in the state. And after studying the disbursement of funds, the Basic Education Funding Commission has voted to adopt a new formula that would theoretically address much of the bias when it comes to how state funds are doled out. That’s great, but the new formula hasn’t actually been enacted and the state has yet to actually pass a budget.
But even when both of those tasks are complete, it won’t eradicate the problem of racial bias in the state’s school funding appropriation. Mosenkis says that the current plan and new formula would potentially split new funding increases more equitably, but they would still build off of the existing, biased funding base for each district—virtually guaranteeing that some level of bias persists.
Pennsylvania isn’t the only state that has a problem with poor minority schools and rich white ones. White flight has left low-income, minority students in failing urban public schools. The compounding issue of low-income neighborhoods and scarce (or biased) funding leaves such schools with little money or resources to educate their students, and thus little hope of breaking the poverty cycle. These disparities become especially disheartening when looking at the current state of school segregation. Purposeful attempts to create more integrated schools, like busing, are virtually nonexistent in the present day. And even changes that would unintentionally result in greater student diversity, like redistricting, are often passionately rejected by the inhabitants of richer, whiter, districts.
Back in 1954, Willett seemed almost hopeful about the promise of the public-school system writing, “What the outcome will be must rest primarily with citizens who care enough to want the best for their children.” But decades later, citizens, lawmakers, and leaders still fail at the task of providing equal educational opportunities for all children, regardless of color or class, and so the future looks bleak indeed.
This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
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