Monday’s court session in the school funding trial ended early when attorneys for legislative leaders withdrew their witness, after a petitioners’ attorney pointed out numerous examples of apparent plagiarism in the witness’s expert report.
Monday’s witness, Mark Ornstein, took the stand, expected to testify on the use of standardized test scores and the impact of class sizes and other interventions on student learning – topics he had addressed in an expert report prepared for this case in 2020. Ornstein has held a variety of positions in educational administration involving charter schools, school districts, intermediate units, and education nonprofits in Philadelphia, Delaware County, and Detroit.
After the attorney representing Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman reviewed Ornstein’s experience with him and asked the court to qualify Ornstein as an expert witness, petitioner attorney Dan Cantor of O’Melveny requested to question Ornstein further in a process called voir dire.
Cantor presented Ornstein with many examples where it appeared that his expert report copied text from another source without citations, including a passage from an undergraduate paper written by a Penn State student and paragraphs that previously appeared verbatim in academic work. Ornstein responded that he could not recall the source of some of his assertions but acknowledged that many of the passages appeared to be copied without an appropriate reference.
Cantor provided the court with pages of examples highlighting the content in the Ornstein report that he believed was taken without attribution, placing those passages alongside the original source material. He asked Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer to deny the respondents’ request to qualify Ornstein as an expert witness.
After initially arguing that Ornstein should still be allowed to testify as an expert, respondent attorneys chose to withdraw Ornstein as a witness following court’s lunch recess, before the judge ruled on the matter.
Prior to Ornstein’s abortive Monday appearance as a witness, the court heard brief testimony from the first and only witness to be called by the governor and secretary of education, the executive respondents in the case.
Their witness, Benjamin Hanft, is chief of the Pennsylvania Department of Education division of subsidy administration. His office performs the calculations defined by law that determine the appropriation of funds to each school district and then oversees those formula-based payments to the districts. These calculations include those used to distribute a portion of state basic education funding, about 14%, through the state’s basic education funding formula.
Hanft discussed the adequacy targets that were calculated and used by the state from 2008 to 2011 as a component of the formula for determining basic education payments to districts.
The trial will resume on Tuesday at 1 pm with testimony from another witness for legislative respondents, Maurice “Reese” Flurie, former CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy, a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
In a brief discussion of trial schedule, attorneys for the legislative respondents told the court they expect to conclude their case next week. Petitioners said that they anticipate calling rebuttal witnesses for no more than a week following the Presidents Day holiday.