In three days of testimony in Commonwealth Court this week, Matthew Stem, the state’s former top K-12 education official, defended the state’s academic standards as appropriately rigorous and highlighted the significant disparities between racial and socio-economic groups in how students measure up against those standards.
And he repeatedly reaffirmed statements by his own Pennsylvania Department of Education that one of the “root causes” of the unequal academic outcomes affecting Black, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged students is the state’s significant funding gaps between low-wealth and high-wealth school districts.
“Funding is a very important factor for improving outcomes,” Stem said. “I think it's very, very unlikely that Pennsylvania will be able to close the achievement gaps that we've seen for decades without additional funding, particularly for schools with high percentages of students in poverty.”
Stem, who served for six years as the state’s deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education until June, concluded his testimony late Thursday afternoon.
The next witness up is Superintendent Amy Arcurio of the Greater Johnstown School District, one of six petitioner school districts that filed suit challenging the state’s school funding system. A career educator, she has lived in the district for 24 years, and her son is a graduate of the district.
Greater Johnstown Superintendent Amy Arcurio
Arcurio took the stand at the end of the day on Thursday, reviewing her educational and work history and job responsibilities. Her testimony will resume on Friday morning.
Stem explained on Tuesday that Pennsylvania’s standards are designed to consider what a college and career-ready graduate would need to be successful. He described them as relevant to the real world, achievable, and rigorous – and designed to help prepare students to be informed citizens.
The Department would not want the standards to be less rigorous. “The world is a rigorous place,” Stem said. He added that the state’s goals of preparing schools to be college- and career-ready “go hand in hand” – students have to be able to transition in a rapidly changing workforce. The standards had bipartisan political support when they were adopted, he said.
But the results of the state’s own assessments, such as the PSSA and Keystone exams, show wide gaps in academic performance between low-income students and their peers, between Black students and white students, and between Latinx and white students.
Stem testified that 29% percent of economically disadvantaged students in Pennsylvania achieve a proficient or advanced score in math – about 16 percentage points lower than the rate for all students; Black students score proficient or advanced on PSSA or Keystone math tests at a rate of 18% percent – 37 percentage points lower than their white peers.
Significant gaps are also seen on a federally administered exam known as the NAEP. While in many cases, Pennsylvania is among the states whose students score higher than average, Stem said that the state’s test score gaps on the NAEP are “among the largest gaps in the country.”
Stem said that everywhere that his department reviews data for subgroups of students – AP exam results, SAT scores, college graduation rates, PSSAs, and more – there are unacceptable achievement gaps for Pennsylvania public school students, caused in large part by the conditions that students experience in public schools.
Addressing these gaps, Stem said, is imperative: “There's an urgent need to ensure that our school systems are providing the conditions for students to be successful, and there is an urgent need to identify the reasons why we see groups that are performing so far behind the majority.”
He attributed the gaps to “decades of systemic inequities in the commonwealth.”
Stem rejected the alternative view that the differences in proficiency scores between subgroups of students can be attributed to attributes such as natural intelligence, work ethic, interest in school, or a desire to take advantage of opportunities. “The department believes that it's schools' responsibility with the appropriate resources to meet the needs of all students to ensure their success,” he said.
Effective strategies for ensuring that students are college- and career-ready have been identified by the department, Stem said. He enumerated more than a dozen such strategies, including high-quality pre-K, effective teachers, sufficient numbers of counselors, remediation in math and reading, access to art and music, and extracurricular activities.
But these strategies cost money, Stem said. Students in poverty need more resources, and English learners need more resources, but low-wealth districts are unable to provide those resources without additional support from the state, he said.
In nearly two days of cross-examination by executive and legislative respondents, Stem responded to a wide range of questions about departmental plans and programs, assessments, and student outcomes.
He rejected the suggestion from respondents that the Pennsylvania Department of Education could be satisfied with the education provided to a student living in poverty who started school far behind in skills and made a year’s academic growth each year but graduated from high school still two or three years below grade level.
Expressing concern about limits on that student’s opportunities, Stem concluded, “The department's position is that when presented with the high-quality resources and appropriate instruction and all the other elements of an effective school system, that every child can be successful.”
Matthew Stem