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Associated Press
Published: December 12, 2006

Groups say school-cost study will help improve education funding
By MARTHA RAFFAELA

HARRISBURG, Pa. - An upcoming study aimed at determining the cost of adequately educating all the state's children is a critical step toward improving the way Pennsylvania funds its public schools, education advocates said Tuesday.

The state Board of Education is undertaking the study at the Legislature's behest under a bill signed by Gov. Ed Rendell in July. The board is expected later this week to announce the hiring of a consultant to perform the study, which must be completed within a year and then reviewed by the House and Senate education committees to possibly develop legislation.

As state and federal governments have raised expectations for student learning, policymakers need to know how much it costs to enable every student to meet Pennsylvania's academic standards, said Ronald Cowell, president of the Harrisburg-based Education Policy and Leadership Center.

"We've gone down this path pretty far about expectations," Cowell said. "What we've not been so effective at is figuring out how we're going to pay for it ... so that every kid has a reasonable opportunity to accomplish this stuff that we say is so important."

The legislation ordering the study calls for an examination of school districts that achieve high standardized test scores with low spending, the effect of enrollment fluctuations on education costs, and whether factors such as poverty levels, population density, and the number of disabled students should warrant more money for a school district.

The state's public schools are funded largely through a combination of local property-tax revenue and state subsidies, with poorer school districts receiving a larger share of state aid. But critics have long complained that poorer schools still do not receive enough to compensate for local revenue shortfalls, and that the state lacks a consistent funding formula.

According to the most current state Education Department data available, state aid accounted for 36 percent of all education funding in the 2004-05 fiscal year.

"You could say we sort of make it up, which is not a very effective way of funding public education," said Janis Risch, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Good Schools Pennsylvania.

Since 1991, 37 other states have completed or are in the process of completing similar studies, according to the National Access Network, a nonprofit education advocacy group affiliated with Columbia University's Teachers College.

Michael A. Rebell, executive director of the college's Campaign for Educational Equity, said cost studies have made a difference in states such as Maryland, where state lawmakers raised the cigarette tax in 2002 to help increase school funding by $1.3 billion over six years.

"The reason these things are really valuable ... is because they bring out in the open a lot of these arcane questions of education finance that are usually decided in the backrooms of the legislature," Rebell said.

Baruch Kintisch, an attorney for the Education Law Center in Philadelphia, said his organization would work with Good Schools Pennsylvania and the Education Policy and Leadership Center to make sure that Pennsylvania's education cost study yields results.

"We've seen a lot of not just great interest, but great dedication on the part of individuals and community leaders around the state to make sure that this isn't just a study that sits on a shelf," Kintisch said.