‘Catastrophic failures’ of Pa. school funding mean students are disadvantaged from the start, plaintiffs argue in landmark trial’s closing

For more than 150 years, Pennsylvania’s constitution has required the state to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of education.

But in its poorest communities, a lawyer for plaintiffs challenging Pennsylvania’s school funding said Thursday, children are attending school in crowded, crumbling buildings without up-to-date textbooks, or staff to provide reading and math interventions — despite test scores showing students aren’t proficient in state standards.

“And why is that?” said the lawyer, Katrina Robson. “Because educational funding in Pennsylvania has become politicized.”

Her contention — that lawmakers’ failure to adequately fund schools now requires court intervention — came during closing arguments before a Commonwealth Court judge in Harrisburg in a landmark trial that began in November over how Pennsylvania pays for public education. A ruling won’t come for months, and appeals are expected.

» READ MORE: Testimony in Pennsylvania’s school funding trial is over. What happens now?

The plaintiffs — six school districts, including Delaware County’s William Penn, along with several families and statewide organizations — allege that Pennsylvania’s approach to education funding violates both the “thorough and efficient” standard and the constitution’s equal protection clause, depriving students in less affluent communities of the educational quality available to those in wealthier districts.

Pennsylvania relies more heavily than most on local revenue to pay for schools, leading to wide spending disparities — and, plaintiffs argue, achievement gaps — between the state’s 500 districts.

“A system that strands children capable of learning in districts that lack the resources necessary to teach them cannot be considered thorough and efficient,” Robson said. “A system in which hundreds of thousands of students fail to meet state standards in math, English language arts, and science cannot be considered adequate.”

Republican legislative leaders, who are defendants in the case, pointed to a different phrase in the education clause — one added in 1967, specifying the General Assembly must provide a thorough and efficient system of education “to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”

It’s the General Assembly’s responsibility to determine what those needs are, said Thomas DeCesar, a lawyer for Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman. Rather than a court stepping in to find education funding unconstitutional, “there is a system in place to address that issue: the elections that are held in Pennsylvania every two years,” DeCesar said.

The arguments followed testimony from 40 school leaders and teachers, state education officials and academic experts over the course of more than three months — and came more than seven years after the case was filed. While Pennsylvania courts had historically rejected education funding challenges, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that it was the judiciary’s role to decide whether funding is constitutional.

On Thursday, plaintiffs and legislative leaders offered differing views of whether that bar was being met. (While Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is also a defendant, he has not contested the case’s claims.)

“The question before this court is not how to construct an ideal system of education, no matter how much it might cost,” said Patrick Northen, a lawyer for House Speaker Bryan Cutler, but “whether petitioners have met their burden” to show the system is unconstitutional.

DeCesar said the state is required to provide an education system with “instruction in core subject matter areas by sufficiently trained teachers,” along with “safe and appropriate facilities” and “basic instrumentalities” needed to teach students.

Plaintiffs didn’t prove that standard wasn’t being met, DeCesar said — arguing that the school districts involved in the case weren’t representative of Pennsylvania as a whole, and that superintendents who testified about inadequate conditions due to insufficient budgets had painted a misleadingly “dystopian” picture.

He said that the Greater Johnstown district, for instance, had spent $400,000 on new lights for its football stadium while kindergarteners were sharing one bathroom stall. “When you take a hard look at the petitioner districts, you see they’re not using their funding in a way that maximizes efficiency,” DeCesar said, arguing the court shouldn’t function as a “super school board.”

Robson, meanwhile, pointed to districts’ testimony about what they weren’t able to afford. In Greater Johnstown — Pennsylvania’s poorest district, Robson said — just two reading specialists are available for 1,200 elementary school students. The district has no math specialists. And when its middle school building fell into disrepair, it had to move those students into the elementary school, leaving younger students with overcrowded classrooms, and older ones without science labs or a library.

To argue that education funding is unconstitutional doesn’t require schools to be “bereft of virtually all programs,” Robson said — also noting that plaintiffs’ claims, which included testimony about Philadelphia, extended far beyond individual districts. She pointed to analysis by an expert witness finding Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts have the greatest student needs, but the least funding.

And by the state’s own educational standards, the system is “yielding unacceptable outcomes,” including poor standardized test scores, Robson said. GOP lawyers argued throughout the trial that test scores weren’t a reflection of educational quality; Robson noted Thursday that Cutler had cited the latest scores, released last week, as “proof” of pandemic learning loss.

While a lawyer for Corman had questioned the relevance of the state’s standards earlier in the trial —suggesting that students “on the McDonald’s track” might not need algebra, or a carpenter, biology — that “makes a mockery of the education clause,” Robson said. The constitution’s framers, she said, sought “to ensure there would not be a two-tiered system of education in the commonwealth.”

And yet, that tiered system exists, Robson said — noting how in the relatively affluent Springfield Township in Montgomery County, the district’s superintendent testified that, in contrast to some of its peers, she had the resources she needed to provide all recommended supports for disadvantaged students.

“The catastrophic failures of this system are not because children look at course guides and aren’t smart enough or industrious enough to seize opportunities,” Robson said, but “because they were denied those opportunities to begin with, from the very moment they had their needs triaged — as if they were walking into a field hospital instead of a kindergarten.”