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by Marc Stier

I’m here to call on the General Assembly to fill the remaining $4 billion gap needed to adequately fund our schools in four years. Let me explain why PA Schools Work believes this is a reasonable goal.

The education budget adopted for the current 2024–25 fiscal year accomplished three very important things. And, unusually for a state budget, the most important accomplishment may be less well known than the less important ones.

First, most people know that the state added more than $1 billion to the state’s support for K–12 education. This is the largest one-year investment in the state’s history.

Second, many people know that this budget shifted the paradigm for state funding of education. Instead of directing most of the new money through the fair funding formula benefitting all districts, the bulk of new funding was, for the first time, dedicated to school districts that were inadequately funded—and that had been for a long time.

And third, relatively few people recognize that the distribution of this adequacy funding was determined by a formula adopted by both Democrats and Republicans—and supported by education advocates like ourselves. The General Assembly and Governor have set clear standards for what adequate funding would be for every school district in the state. We now have a bipartisan political agreement that tells us how much each school district must spend to provide an adequate education and how much the state should provide of that funding.

The adequacy formula is based on state standards for an adequate education. It is derived from an analysis of how much successful schools in Pennsylvania spend. And that analysis is then applied to each school district, adjusting funding levels for the particular needs of the students in each district and the ability of each district to raise funds on its own.

Governor Shapiro and the General Assembly deserve a great deal of credit for this bipartisan achievement. But we also know that they reached this agreement, in part, because the Pennsylvania Courts demanded it. Judge Jubelirer’s decision in the education funding lawsuit made it clear that the way we fund schools was not only immoral, as our campaign has said for years, but unconstitutional. Judge Jubelirer’s profound decision set a constitutional goal—adequate and equitable funding for every school— but she left it up to the General Assembly to determine exactly what level of funding is needed to meet that goal.

That is what the General Assembly and Governor did in June. They determined that adequately and equitably funding schools in Pennsylvania required that the state spend an additional $4.5 billion and distribute that money by using the agreed-upon formula.

However, the budget for the current fiscal year only added about $500 million in adequacy funding. That means we need another $4 billion in state aid to our schools to meet the lawsuit’s requirements, as determined by the General Assembly itself.

We understand that the state cannot, and should not, add $4 billion in one fell swoop. School districts really don’t have the capacity to absorb and effectively spend that much so quickly.

But we also believe that the state cannot put off adding this new funding for too long. That’s why today we are calling on the state to add an additional billion dollars in adequacy funding to the state budget in each of the next four years. Or, as our slogan says, we are demanding that the state “fill it in four.”

Every year we fall short of the additional $4 billion in adequacy spending is one more year in which we fail to meet our moral and constitutional responsibility to the children of the state. Every year we fall short of providing a fully adequate education to our children, we leave more of them behind, making it more difficult for them to reach their full potential. Every year we fall short of filling the adequacy gap in four years, we shortchange our state of the huge benefits of our most precious resource, the talents and abilities of our children.

That’s why we must fill it in four.