In a combination of overstatement and bad timing, the Legislature’s nonpartisan Independent Fiscal Office needlessly has complicated the simple question of whether the state government underfunds about 200 of its 500 school districts.
The IFO recently analyzed the Department of Education budget. By law, it is required to assess spending relative to certain performance metrics when analyzing any agency’s budget. It declared in the DOE report, regarding the relationship between spending and students’ test scores, that “the data suggests there is little or no correlation.”
That generally reflects the position that the Republican legislative leadership has taken as a defendant in an ongoing trial in Commonwealth Court, in which six school districts and several education advocacy groups have sued in pursuit of equitable funding.
When the Legislature adopted a “fair funding formula” in 2015, it tacitly acknowledged that the previous formula was unfair. Yet the state continues to distribute about 88% of funding under the old formula. If all of the money was distributed according to the fair formula, as it should be, the Scranton School District alone would receive an additional $30 million-plus per year.
Plaintiffs made a strong case in testimony by school district leaders and education experts that funding affects performance.
But the IFO report that found “little or no correlation” between funding and test scores looked at only the 2018-2019 school year, and only at the dollars and test scores, rather than the vastly disparate economic and demographic issues that make each district unique.
In 2015 a legislative commission chaired by two Republicans cited those very issues, including poverty and the number of English as a second language students, that made each district unique.
IFO Director Matthew Knittel cautioned that the citation of a single-year comparison is not a conclusion that spending does not affect outcomes. The analysis of spending and proficiency was “not meant to be a deep dive,” he said.
It’s crucial that the Legislature does not treat a single line in a 63-page report as a deep dive, and that it finally corrects the inequities it has created in education funding.
— Scranton Times-Tribune
