Pennsylvania’s school funding is unconstitutional. A Swarthmore professor explains why the system is still difficult to change.

As depicted by the creative solutions and struggles of the staff of the TV show Abbott Elementary each week, the entire country is now aware that Philadelphia’s public schools are underfunded.

But many don’t know that even after factoring in poverty and local incomes, Philadelphia and other predominantly Black and brown districts in Pennsylvania receive less funding than predominantly white districts.

Roseann Liu, a visiting professor in Asian American studies and education studies at Swarthmore College, said that if the entire state education funding budget were distributed equitably, the School District of Philadelphia would receive millions more each year. But, she added, state lawmakers have been highly resistant to changing the funding structure.

“That proposal,” she said, “has always been seen as a nonstarter.”

That remains the case even after the Commonwealth Court ruled last year that the state’s school funding system is unconstitutional, in a lawsuit led by the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center, and O’Melveny & Myers LLP on behalf of parents, school districts, and education groups.

The court determined that “the executive and legislative branches of government and administrative agencies with expertise in the field of education” must “devise a plan to address the constitutional deficiencies identified herein” with the petitioners.

In February, Gov. Josh Shapiro released a budget plan that included a more than $1 billion increase in education funding, $872 million of which would be distributed using a new “adequacy formula” that directs more money to historically underfunded districts. But this plan has yet to be voted through by the state legislature, and a legislative commission recently determined that several billion more would be necessary to fully meet the court’s stipulations.

In March, Liu published a book on Pennsylvania’s education funding inequities, Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve. Her book relies on policy analysis and field work that she performed as a funding reform advocate for POWER, a local grassroots and interfaith group fighting for racial and economic justice. Liu wrote Designed to Fail with the average person in mind, hoping to explain Pennsylvania’s funding woes to an audience beyond academics and those already in the know.

She spoke with The Inquirer about her new book; how her research shows Pennsylvania’s “fair funding” formula only distributes a small fraction of the education budget equitably, and why headlines about lawmakers securing funding for their school districts are not always what they seem.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Local wealth disparities are completely a part of the problem. The fact that school funding in this country is so dependent on local revenues is a major part of the problem.

But there are three strings of funding: federal, state, and local. State funding is actually supposed to correct for some of those local disparities. And one of the major things that advocates, and my book tries to show, is that the state funding is distributed in ways that are racially biased.

What that means in Pennsylvania is that the state legislators have approved of a method to distribute state money that actually further benefits whiter school districts.

In 2016, the Basic Education Funding Commission, a committee of the state legislature, adopted a fair funding formula. They wanted to account for wealth, poverty, number of English learners, geographies, enrollment, and other things. But although they adopted the fair funding formula, the lawmakers created this asterisk in the law that meant only new money would be subject to the formula.

» READ MORE: Education advocates say they have a plan to fix Pa.’s school funding system. It would cost $6.2 billion over 5 years.

There’s already a certain allocated amount of base funding. Every single year, the governor puts forth a proposal to increase it by a certain amount. These numbers change, but in 2019 to 2020 only 10% of the budget was new money. So in some ways, we could think of it as only 10% of state education aid was actually distributed in a racially equitable manner.

The lion’s share of state funding is distributed through this policy known as Hold Harmless. It has been the enemy for racial justice advocates. It’s a very weird, weird policy. If we think about how students should get funded, I think most people would agree that the more students that you have in a school district, the more state funding you should have, right? Hold Harmless completely upends that logic.

» READ MORE: East vs. West: How geography — and politics — play into how Pa. funds its schools

Instead of distributing state aid dynamically according to a district’s changing student enrollment, the policy guarantees that school districts get as much as they received during a baseline year, whether or not it showed increased or decreased student enrollment.

And a lot of education aid is based on outdated student population data from the 1990s. So, the School District of Philadelphia but also Reading and these other majority-minority urban school districts, they’ve had increases in their student population since the 1990s and Hold Harmless doesn’t actually recognize that.

Oftentimes senior level politicians use their status as a way of securing additional funding for their school district. And that is a sloppily adhered Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It barely even treats the symptoms. But you have these state legislators who are crowing and trying to get themselves in the news to brag about the school funding that they secure when in actuality, they’re really just avoiding the larger and more systemic issues.

They express a willful neglect and make a thousand small decisions to protect their own white districts that were benefiting from inequitable school funding. There’s oftentimes so much legislative activity that actually produces so little change.

Cheryl Harris, who’s a critical race theorist, talks about how white privilege is seen as the neutral baseline. And that is pretty much why getting rid of Hold Harmless and putting all the fair funding formula is seen as a nonstarter for state legislators. The reason it’s untouchable is because of lot of whiter school districts wouldn’t be getting the kinds of school funding privileges that they were used to.

In some ways, it’s a very intractable problem and in some ways, it’s also a problem that’s made by human beings. So it’s not as if these are things that we can’t fix.

A term in the book that I talk about is “agentive structural racism.” While these things do perpetuate themselves, they do so through the actions of people, and in this case, state legislators who were in powerful positions.

Yes, structural racism is built into the system, and yes, there are people who actually make decisions that perpetuate that.

Correction: This article was corrected to reflect the uncertainty over how much money the School District of Philadelphia would receive if all state funding money were distributed through the fair funding formula.