After 48 days in the courtroom, witness testimony in the Pennsylvania school funding trial concluded Tuesday, with petitioners presenting their rebuttal case. They called just one witness: Professor Matthew Kelly of Penn State University, who previously testified as an expert on Pennsylvania’s school finance system on Nov. 19 in petitioners’ case-in-chief.
In his November testimony, Kelly summarized his view of the Commonwealth’s school funding system. The poorest districts have the great needs; the poorest districts receive the least amount of funding; and districts with the greatest needs are furthest from meeting standards.
“In the Commonwealth currently, those districts that need the most get the least,” he said.
Kelly returned to rebut claims from expert witnesses called by respondents that questioned this description of school funding in Pennsylvania. For example, Jason Willis, a research director at WestEd called by Senator Cutler, claimed that schools serving more poor students receive more funding in Pennsylvania than their counterparts.
Kelly’s rebuttal testimony illuminated a fundamental error that counsel for petitioners had previously explored in their cross examination of Willis: an apparent failure to properly account for students who attend charter schools.
After Kelly’s testimony concluded, Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer announced the schedule for post-trial briefings. Closing statements are set to take place in Harrisburg on Thursday, March 10, at 9:00 a.m. Post-trial briefings on the legal issues in the case will continue into July, followed by oral argument on those issues.
Kelly said that charter school funding can be structured in a variety of ways, depending on the state. In Pennsylvania, school districts make direct payments to charter schools when students who reside within their boundaries choose to attend them.
A portion of school district revenue that ultimately goes to fund charter schools is known as “pass-through” revenue—funding that school districts pass on to charter schools, and do not use themselves. This revenue is included in school district funding totals. Kelly said that to accurately calculate per pupil revenues, Pennsylvania uses a measure called Average Daily Membership (ADM), which is the combined total of a district’s students and students who live in the district and attend charter schools. In this way, the state can properly account for both charter school funding and the corresponding charter school students in a given school district.
Thus, Pennsylvania appropriately attributes students to “the district where they reside—the district that is fiscally responsible for them,” Kelly said.
In his testimony, Kelly explained how data from the U.S. Census—relied upon by many of respondents’ experts—makes a fundamental error when it calculates revenue per pupil in Pennsylvania. It includes the revenue that is ultimately passed through to charter schools in the numerator but does not include charter school students in the denominator, he said.
The U.S. Census reports that 1.5 million students are educated in Pennsylvania public schools—about 200,000 less than Pennsylvania’s total public school student population, including those enrolled in charter schools. The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) reports that Pennsylvania’s per pupil revenue is $17,622. As a result of the undercount of students in Census data, the revenue per pupil of $20,434 erroneously reported by the Census is nearly $3,000 per student more than this actual figure.
Kelly demonstrated this apparent error in action by looking at Census data for the School District of Philadelphia. In 2017-18, Philadelphia’s ADM was 203,000. This includes 131,000 students who are enrolled in district schools and an additional 72,000 students who live in the district and attend charter schools. Pennsylvania Department of Education data lists Philadelphia’s revenue per ADM as $16,385.
The U.S. Census data for the same year lists Philadelphia’s enrollment as 131,238—only accounting for students enrolled in district schools. But the Census uses the same revenue figure that is used to calculate ADM—$3.4 billion—which includes revenue that the district passes on to charter schools. Kelly showed that dividing this revenue figure by this deflated enrollment count (which excludes charter school students) works out to $26,000 per student, the revenue number the Census reports for Philadelphia.
By including revenue passed through to charter schools and excluding charter school students, the U.S. Census artificially inflates the per-pupil funding level for the state’s largest school district by $10,000 per student, he said.
Kelly explained that an analysis from respondents’ expert Jason Willis, purporting to show that Pennsylvania’s school funding is equitable, was undermined by this same error. Willis sorted schools based on need and concluded that higher-needs schools in Pennsylvania receive more funding, because his per-pupil spending numbers for schools serving significant numbers of charter students were artificially inflated, Kelly said.
Kelly pointed out that charter schools are concentrated in the highest-need school districts in Pennsylvania, which would mean that a failure to properly account for them would “essentially invert” Pennsylvania’s spending patterns. “It will make high-poverty, high-need districts appear like they have more funding per pupil than they actually do,” he said.
Kelly also critiqued the analysis done by respondent witness Dr. Abel Koury, analyzing the correlation between districts’ per-pupil spending and their Average Growth Index (AGI) – a measure of academic progress derived from a year-to-year comparison of individual student test scores.
Kelly concluded that AGI scores cannot reasonably be used as a measure of growth to compare districts to each other. He pointed out examples of districts with identical underlying academic growth scores that had drastically different AGI metrics and showed evidence that AGI scores are highly volatile from one year to the next. In addition, Koury’s analysis used funding data that were not adjusted for relative student need, which Kelly said is inappropriate when comparing districts to each other.
Koury’s analysis, he said, “does not provide information” about the relationship between spending and academic growth in Pennsylvania.
Judge Jubelirer adjourned Tuesday’s proceeding wrapping up the months of witness testimony in the case, remarking that it was “an honor to be able to preside over this case and to be able to see such excellent advocacy and lawyering.”