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Pennsylvania school funding trial comes to a close. Here’s what you missed

Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer will decide whose argument holds more weight, though a ruling is months away.

  • By Mallory Falk/WHYY
Shown are lockers at South Philadelphia High School, Sept. 9, 2013, in Philadelphia.

 Matt Rourke / AP Photo

Shown are lockers at South Philadelphia High School, Sept. 9, 2013, in Philadelphia.

After a seven-year journey to Commonwealth Court and months of testimony, the case against Pennsylvania’s system for funding education could be summed up in one sentence: “Low-wealth districts do not have the resources they need to prepare all children for college, career, and civic success.”

That’s the argument petitioner attorney Katrina Robson put forward on the last day of the trial.

Petitioners in the case — which include six school districts, several parents, and two statewide organizations — are asking the court to find that the state’s current funding system is inadequate, inequitable, and illegal. They say Pennsylvania is not meeting its constitutional mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient” education, and that funding disparities among districts are so wide the state is violating its own equal protection clause.

”But defense attorneys for GOP legislative leaders say Pennsylvania’s public schools “pass constitutional muster,” that the state has taken steps to distribute funding more equitably — through a student-weighted funding formula — and that pouring more money into the system won’t necessarily lead to better student outcomes.

Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer will decide whose argument holds more weight, though a ruling is months away. The losing side is expected to appeal, kicking the decision up to the State Supreme Court.

Jessica Kourkounis / Keystone Crossroads

Students change classes at a public school in Pennsylvania.

As she began her closing argument on Thursday, Robson circled back to the first day of the trial, when defense attorneys representing GOP legislative leaders claimed that the “constitutional mandate is being exceeded” in school districts across the Commonwealth.

“Those words ring hollow after three months of testimony from superintendents, teachers, and a very brave student about the actual learning conditions in lower wealth districts,” Robson argued.

That testimony included stories of children forced to learn in hallways and closets due to overcrowding, and buildings “riddled” with mildew or asbestos or forced to close “because there weren’t sufficient funds to remediate unsafe conditions,” she said.

It included examples of schools without enough, or any, math and reading interventionists to help close learning gaps, and “report after report showing that students in those under-resourced districts are not able to meet state academic standards,” Robson said.

Testimony throughout the trial has been “overwhelmingly consistent” on a few key points, Robson said: that every student can learn; that some students require more resources to learn than others; and that lower wealth school districts serve a greater share of students that need more resources.

Yet in Pennsylvania, she said, the districts that need the most receive the least, partly because the state relies more heavily than most on local taxes to fund schools.

“The very poorest districts are left with both high tax burdens and substantial funding shortfalls,” Robson said, leading to some of the widest spending gaps between poor and wealthy districts in the nation.

“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 argued. “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.”

In this file photo, a student walks into a classroom at Jay Cooke Elementary in North Philadelphia. Philadelphia is among the school districts most shortchanged by the way Pennsylvania funds public education, according to a new analysis in a lawsuit challenging the system.

Heather Khalifa / Philadelphia Inquirer

In this file photo, a student walks into a classroom at Jay Cooke Elementary in North Philadelphia. Philadelphia is among the school districts most shortchanged by the way Pennsylvania funds public education, according to a new analysis in a lawsuit challenging the system.

Do Pa. schools “pass constitutional muster”?

Defense attorneys pushed back against Robson’s dire portrait of the petitioner districts — while also stressing that the question in front of the court is whether the state’s education system is meeting the “minimum requirements of the constitution.”

“Every one of the districts suing in this case is well above the constitutional threshold,” said Thomas DeCesar, a lawyer representing Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman.

The case is not about whether the court, petitioners or respondents would “prefer to change something about Pennsylvania’s system of education,” DeCesar said, but about “whether the system of education in Pennsylvania is, as the petitioners claim, a system that is deficient, and one which is so deficient that it is unconstitutional.”

“Of course there are things about public education in Pennsylvania that we would like to do better,” said Patrick Northen, an attorney for House Speaker Bryan Cutler. “But the question before this court is not how to construct an ideal system of public education, no matter how much it might cost” but “whether petitioners have met their burden” of proving that the system violates the constitution.

Both lawyers said that Pennsylvania schools are providing students with the education basics and more.

“Every petitioner district is providing its students with instruction in core subject matter areas including math, English, science, social studies, health, phys ed, foreign language and technology,” DeCesar said. The districts provide math, music, and drama instruction and remedial supports; they have special education and English language programs.

These districts were “handpicked because, in the petitioners’ view, they are the best representations of what they believe is wrong with the system,” DeCesar said, and yet in his view they all “pass constitutional muster by a wide margin.”

They also pushed back against using measures like statewide standardized tests to determine the quality of students’ education. Northen argued that achievement gaps can be linked to factors outside of school control.

“Unsatisfactory test scores and other outcomes in some school districts [are] not the result of constitutionally underfunding public schools, but of the larger societal, community, and personal factors, including the well-documented impact of poverty on cognitive development and academic performance,” he said.

Petitioners have cited the impact on poverty on student learning as one of the reasons lower wealth districts need additional resources, but Northen argued that schools are not constitutionally required to address “all barriers to education that are caused by poverty or personal or family circumstances.”

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4-month trial in lawsuit over public school funding wraps