Year after year, our predecessor organization and many others have released research showing both that the vast majority of Pennsylvania K–12 school districts are underfunded and that school districts with a high share of students who come from impoverished families or are Black or Hispanic are disproportionately among them.
That analysis was accepted by Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who ruled that Pennsylvania’s system of K–12 school funding is unconstitutional.
And yet, with less than a week to go before the fiscal year 2024–25 budget is due, there are still members of the General Assembly who refuse to accept these basic facts.
So here we put forward our most recent update of the data we have provided in the past: estimates of the per-student funding gap in Pennsylvania’s five hundred K–12 school districts divided based on the share of students who live in poverty or who are Black or Hispanic.