UPDATE July 11, 2024 – The General Assembly passed a state budget, which unfortunately did not include the long-term plan for a new, constitutional public school funding system laid out in HB 2370.
The budget does, however, calculate a target for how much additional state funding is needed for public schools. Even after artificially reducing the constitutional funding gap calculated in HB 2370 by undercounting students in poverty, both chambers of the legislature have now agreed that adequately funded public education would require, at minimum, an additional $4.5 billion in state funding distributed to the communities that need it most.
The budget begins to fill this gap with additional, desperately needed resources targeted to underfunded public schools. For the first time, the largest portion of new state education aid, called “adequacy funding,” is the portion dedicated exclusively to districts with identified funding gaps, as the Basic Education Funding Commission and the House had proposed. But the legislature has made no commitment for future years. Now, educators and students await a long-term commitment to fill the entire unconstitutional funding gap. Read more in our statement on the 2024-25 state budget.
Check out an interactive map to see how the long-term plan for comprehensive public school funding adopted by the Pennsylvania House in June 2024 would close the adequacy gaps across Pennsylvania.
Underfunding in Pennsylvania public schools is widespread, fueled by insufficient state support. Hundreds of thousands of students in cities, small towns and suburbs are going without the basic resources they need to realize their potential and succeed.
Students in Johnstown are going without the support of reading specialists. Just 15% of Pennsylvania’s lowest wealth schools have librarians. Nine buildings in Allentown School District are more than 100 years old and need extensive maintenance, and they are far from alone: children frequently lose out on learning due to unsafe school facilities. While the American School Counselor Association recommends a school counselor ratio of one to 250 students, Pottstown School District has two counselors for 991 middle schoolers and two for 990 high school students.
Our students have a fundamental right to education, but for too long, that right has been thwarted by a public school funding system that relies on local wealth. In Feb. 2023, Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled that this is unconstitutional, and must change.
Now, there’s a serious long-term plan to fix this injustice: Pennsylvania House Bill 2370, which passed the House with bipartisan support on June 10, 2024. The plan would provide funding based on what students need to succeed, not what communities can afford.
This comprehensive school funding reform builds on months of careful work. After the court’s decision in the school funding lawsuit, the Basic Education Funding Commission, a panel of legislators and designees of Gov. Shapiro, met to develop a plan to fix Pennsylvania’s inadequate and inequitable funding system. Throughout 2023, the commission heard from educators, parents, and experts at 11 public hearings and received more than 1,000 public comments.
The commission put together a final majority report, a plan for a fundamental change to the way we fund our public schools. HB 2370 would put this plan into law.
Instead of continuing to fund public schools based on local wealth and Harrisburg politics, the plan calculates how much funding is needed in every school district and establishes a plan to deliver the necessary funding.
The commission’s report found that, altogether, Pennsylvania public schools are underfunded by $5.4 billion. HB 2370 would provide $5.1 billion in additional annual state funding—a constitutional adequacy investment—to students in underfunded public schools over seven years of annual increases, closing the gap in 367 school districts found to have fewer resources than their students need.
This funding gap was computed by calculating the median spending by school districts that meet Pennsylvania’s academic goals, considering both basic and special education costs, relative to their students’ needs. The bill sets that as the funding target for all school districts.
This plan also recognizes that local taxpayers have been picking up the slack for insufficient state funding at a high cost to communities. HB 2370 also calls for $970 million in property tax equity funding, directed to districts where local taxpayers pay the highest tax rates relative to their community’s wealth.
These investments for public schools and our communities would be phased in over seven years, and would increase total public education funding statewide by 15%. Check out the interactive map to see the impact of this plan.
The plan also provides stable and predictable funding to every school district, even those that were not found to be underfunded. HB 2370 would reset the “base” of the state’s hold harmless policy—which would mean that no school district will ever receive less state funding than they do this year.
View a spreadsheet of the impact of HB 2370 for every school district.
If fully implemented, this plan will mean thousands more teachers, counselors, librarians, and school nurses delivering what every child deserves: the opportunity to thrive. A recent analysis of the economic impact of this investment concluded that the plan would lead to significant improvements in student outcomes and long-term economic benefits for the state.
The plan is not perfect. It does not include additional funding for pre-K, which educators and the court agree is an essential resource, or for addressing the enormous need to upgrade school facilities. Seven years is a long wait for students. But make no mistake: This plan is a game-changer.
We have one—and only one—long-term plan on the table for public school funding that respects students’ fundamental constitutional right to education. That’s HB 2370. Use this tool to find your state senator and tell them to pass this plan into law.
The Details: Adequacy Funding
The Basic Education Funding Commission’s adopted majority report found that Pennsylvania public schools are underfunded by $5.4 billion. This calculation used Pennsylvania’s own measures for the needs of students who require more support, such as students in poverty and students who are learning English.
Adequacy funding calculates what it would cost to provide every school district with the same level of resources as academically successful districts, relative to the needs of their student body. For more details, read this public testimony from Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, which brought the school funding lawsuit along with Education Law Center - PA and O’Melveny.
This underfunding can be found in every kind of community: small towns, big cities, and suburbs.
Nearly 3 out of 4 school districts lack the funding they need to support student success – 367 districts out of Pennsylvania’s 500.
The median district with a shortfall has a shortfall of $2,568 per student.
The lowest-wealth school districts account for 26% of the state’s students, but 62% of the statewide adequacy gap.
Black and Latino students are concentrated in these districts, with 43% of the state’s Black and Latino students attending districts in the lowest-wealth 20%.
Under the long-term plan, 87 school districts, serving more than 520,000 students, would receive adequacy investments of $4,000 or more per pupil.
These districts include Shenandoah Valley in rural Schuylkill County, with an enrollment of 1,200—and 24 other small districts with enrollments of fewer than 1,500 students—as well as the School District of Philadelphia, the state’s largest, serving 195,000 students.
The plan tasks the state of Pennsylvania with providing $5.1 billion in additional annual funding, phased in over seven years, filling 94% of this gap. The state of Pennsylvania would finally take on its fair share of responsibility for funding public schools.
The remaining $291 million local share is left to school districts making local tax efforts at the 33rd percentile or below to ensure fairness with school districts who face smaller adequacy shortfalls because their taxpayers are paying more. The plan does not require increases in local taxes in any district.
The Details: Tax Equity
In Pennsylvania’s current upside-down public school funding system, many of the least wealthy communities in the commonwealth are paying the highest property tax rates, trying to provide resources for their students in the face of state underfunding.
The long-term plan recognizes the efforts of taxpayers in these communities by providing $970 million in annual property tax equity funding, phased in over seven years, to 196 school districts where local taxpayers are paying tax rates, relative to their local wealth, at or above the 66th percentile for districts in Pennsylvania.
A few school districts with local wealth far above the state median that also choose to collect local taxes at high rates are excluded from this supplement using the following formula for a fractional local capacity index: dividing a district’s local capacity per weighted student by the median value, subtracting one, and then subtracting that result from one. The value is one for districts below the median.
What about the BEF Commission’s minority report?
A minority made up of Republican commission members also released a report, which was not adopted by the Basic Education Funding Commission. This report does not attempt to determine the funding public schools need to meet the standard set by the court’s decision.
Both reports, however, agree that the current funding system is unconstitutional and must change, and agree on many of the educational interventions that will make a difference for children. These strategies—including career and technical education, evidence-based student support, and school safety—all require more dedicated professional staff, and all cost money that is not available in hundreds of Pennsylvania school districts under the current funding system. Such interventions are listed in HB 2370 as appropriate uses for additional state funding.