The cross examination of Jason Willis, legislative respondents’ expert witness on Pennsylvania’s school funding system, dominated Friday’s court proceeding in the school funding case.
Willis, a researcher and program director at WestEd, a nonprofit education-focused research agency, gave detailed testimony Thursday based on the expert report he prepared in the case on behalf of legislative leaders. He maintained that Pennsylvania funds education more generously than most states and, through its school funding formula, has been delivering more state funding to high-needs districts and districts with less local revenue.
On direct examination, Willis testified that his assessment of spending levels suggested that petitioner districts in the case are spending their money less efficiently than similar peer districts – a finding that came into question under cross-examination.
Willis testified that he plotted academic growth in relation to per pupil costs for the petitioner districts and what he identified as 20 comparison districts for each. With a chart for each petitioner district, Willis purported to show that petitioner districts perform worse than some of their peer districts that are spending less per pupil.
On cross-examination, attorney Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of the Public Interest Law Center questioned Willis’ methodology regarding his peer comparisons. For example, Willis compared the School District of Lancaster ̶ a high-needs, urban district where 91% of students are economically disadvantaged – to two much smaller, affluent suburban districts, Radnor Township and Jenkintown.
Urevick-Ackelsberg also flagged a number of examples where districts were depicted as having implausibly high per-pupil spending levels—exceeding comparable state reporting for spending by tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. Chester Upland School District, one of the state’s poorest, was shown on one of Willis’s charts as spending $36,000 per pupil, about twice the level reported in state financial documents. Another figure showed York City and Harrisburg City school districts to be outspending Radnor Township, which is perennially among the very highest-spending districts in the state.
Urevick-Ackelsberg presented evidence from state financial documents that suggested the exaggerated spending numbers in these and other tables in the report stemmed from a failure to properly account for students from these districts who are enrolled in charter schools, whereby districts have funding that they are required to pass through to charter schools.
Questioning of Willis indicated that he had included the tuition expense that districts pay directly to charter schools as part of a school district’s funding, while failing to count charter school students as part of a district’s population, thereby significantly inflating the districts’ per pupil spending. To give an example, Urevick-Ackelsberg pointed to the School District of Philadelphia, where more than 70,000 students who live in the district attend charter schools and 130,000 are educated in district-run schools. By failing to include the charter school students in the enrollment number while including their funding in spending-per-student calculations, Willis appeared to have improperly inflated the district’s per pupil expenditures.
This meant, Urevick-Ackelsberg suggested, that districts with large charter populations consistently showed inflated per pupil spending levels in Willis’s presentation. In the case of Chester Upland, leaving out its charter school students (who make up a majority of the district’s population) results in a per pupil expenditure figure more than double the actual amount reported in state data.
Willis said he didn’t know whether he included charter students in the calculations.
Urevick-Ackelsberg pointed out the same data issue in a table prepared by Willis as an “equity analysis” of education spending across the state. This table divided Pennsylvania schools into 20 groups, sorted by level of student need. It purported to show that the Pennsylvania schools with the greatest student need – determined by giving added weight for numbers of low-income students and English learners – receive the highest level of funding.
In this table prepared by Willis, the omission of charter school students from the calculations of average per-pupil spending was apparent because the chart included a total number of schools and total enrollment for Pennsylvania. Both numbers were low and aligned with the non-charter-school counts for Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s charter schools are concentrated in the state’s highest-need districts, Urevick-Ackelsberg said. By making an error that specifically inflated spending figures for those districts, he said it appeared that Willis had “flipped the inequity of Pennsylvania school funding on its head.”
In response to questioning, Willis did not offer an explanation as to why his report showed some of the poorest districts in Pennsylvania spending more than some of the wealthiest districts, other than that his methodology involved some adjustments to cost figures. “I have not been able to validate those numbers relative to the information you’ve been sharing with me today,” he said.
When asked during cross-examination about other reports he has authored assessing equitable funding in other states, Willis acknowledged that research has shown a positive relationship between spending and achievement.
Acknowledging prior references in his work to recent research studies using new techniques and larger data sets to establish a causal relationship between funding and educational outcomes, Willis said that “those statistical techniques do offer some additional degree of certainty than what we had had in previous decades in this field.” Willis acknowledged drawing on the work of researchers including Rucker Johnson, Clive Belfield, and Steven Barnett – three of the expert witnesses who have testified for petitioners in this case.
With regard to school resources, Willis stated, “there's a near consensus that it costs more to educate students from low-income backgrounds to support equitable achievement of outcomes” but added that “there still is dispute about some of that research.”
Willis acknowledged research pointing to a number of interventions that have been shown to lead to better achievement among low-income students, including prekindergarten, small class size, intensive tutoring, community schools, counselors, social workers, and mental health supports. He stressed that these interventions need to be undertaken by highly qualified staff and that they vary in the strength of the effect and the cost. For example, he pointed to the importance of high-quality preschool and small class size and characterized them as costly interventions.
While his report focused on funding increases from the state of Pennsylvania, particularly following the adoption of a fair funding formula, Willis admitted on cross-examination that his report did not look at whether aid levels were adequate to address the rising costs faced by school districts for special education and pensions. He also conceded that his report did not examine costs associated with the extensive facilities needs of school districts.
Willis, who has conducted adequacy studies in other states, also referenced research indicating that increased school spending “leads to higher graduation rates at a state or multi-state level” and that “education is one of the pathways that individuals are able to achieve greater social and economic means throughout their lifetimes.” Improving education outcomes could in turn “translate into larger economic output and greater societal benefits,” he said.
The trial will resume on Monday, with the legislative respondents expected to call their final witnesses next week. They include three more expert witnesses: Max Eden, Abel Koury, and Eric Hanushek.