Rendell: Boost education funding a 3rd time

by Paul Socolar on Feb 10 2010 Posted in Eye on the budget

Advocates for school funding are mostly cheering Tuesday's budget news from Harrisburg. Despite a tight fiscal situation, Gov. Rendell has for the third straight year introduced a budget with big increases in basic education spending aimed at moving school districts across the state closer to targets for funding adequacy set in 2008.

Details of the budget proposal are available on the Pennsylvania Department of Education website.

This year's proposed increase of $355 million in basic education funding would push the state's total basic subsidy for school districts to $5.9 billion, an increase of more than 6 percent over last year.

For the second straight year, the state is using more than $650 million in federal stimulus dollars to cover a sizeable chunk of the overall expenditure. Funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does not continue beyond 2010.

Gerald Zahorchak, the governor's education secretary, said at a press briefing Tuesday afternoon that the additional funds for basic education would continue to be distributed to school districts using a funding formula also established in 2008, which weighs a variety of factors including enrollment, poverty rates, and tax effort.

Zahorchak noted that the state still has a long way to go to close the adequacy gaps identifed in a "costing-out" study commissioned by the state legislature. Most districts in the state are $2,000 or more per pupil below the spending level necessary to ensure an adequate education according to that study.

After three years devoted to pushing toward those adequacy targets, he said this budget proposal would get the state 41 percent of the way toward closing the gap, with funding increases over those years totaling $929 million. Originally, the Rendell administration had projected that the gap would be closed in six years.

Funding increases are not across the board. The governor is proposing level funding for a number of other major education appropriations, including special education, charter school reimbursements, Pre-K Counts, Accountability Block Grants, and a dual enrollment program. Head Start faces a 2 percent cut in the Rendell budget, and the state's tutoring initiative, the Education Assistance Program, would face a 6 percent cut. Overall, the increase in public school spending by the state would be less than 5 percent.

Administration officials highlight a recent study by the Center for Education Policy, finding that Pennsylvania was the only state in the nation to show improvement in every grade in both reading and math from 2002 to 2008.