DN Editorial: Dysfunctional pols realize school funding formula needs fixing

HOW BROKEN is Pennsylvania's school funding formula?

So broken that the Legislature actually decided to do something about it.

It created a bipartisan commission to study the current formula and come up with a new, more workable and fairer one.

The Basic Education Funding Commission released its report and recommendations last week and it contains a lot of good news for the Philadelphia School District.

Instead of the hodgepodge formula the state uses now to dole out aid, it calls for a new one that begins with true enrollment.

As hard as it is to believe, the current formula can be based on enrollment of 10 or 20 years ago. Since the heart of the old formula is "hold harmless," a provision that says a district cannot get less than it did the previous year, additional money was being sent out to districts that had enrollment declines while districts that had experienced growth were shortchanged.

So, basing state aid on a district's actual enrollment is a big improvement.

The proposal also "weights" enrollment to take into consideration other factors, including the number of poor students the district has, the number of students for whom English is their second language and the enrollment of charter schools.

Since Philadelphia has a high number of poor students and lots of students with limited English, plus a large charter school population, it would benefit under the proposed formula. Rural districts, where there are fewer taxpayers, also would be given extra aid.

If passed by the Legislature, the basic-education funding proposal will represent a big step forward when it comes to fairness and predictability. (Districts often don't know from one year to the next how much state aid they will get, so it's a nightmare to build a budget.)

One ticklish issue that will present political problems is: what to do with the districts that have benefited from the hold-harmless provision in the current formula? Any new formula would deliver a shock to those districts - the commission estimates that 320 of the state's 500 districts would get approximately $1 billion less under a new formula.

So, the commission hedged a bit on the issue of hold-harmless, saying that it should be phased out over time. It offered several variations on how this could be done. That issue, too, is a political one that will have to be hashed out by the Legislature.

The fact that the commission's recommendations were unanimous is significant. There were 15 legislators on the commission, Democrat and Republican. Their support will help get the bill based on the report passed.

But, districts shouldn't plan their budgets based on a new formula.

Although the commission came up with a better way to slice the pie, it did not address the size of the pie.

For the proposed formula to work best, the state needs to step up and increase the money it spends on basic education. That's a matter for Gov. Wolf, who wants a major increase in state aid, and the Republican legislature, whose conservative members are loath to increase taxes to pay for any boost in aid.

That is a dispute that will have to be hashed out in state budget negotiations. The deadline to come up with a new budget is June 30, but no one in Harrisburg expects to meet that deadline. This is a fight that could last all summer.