Republicans and Democrats disagree on the benchmark data to use to distribute funds to school districts.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — As state budget negotiations go past its ninth day since the original deadline, a disagreement on the methods used to distribute education funding has become a sticking point.
Republicans and Democrats differ on which set of data to use to determine which school districts get the most funding based on their “adequacy gap” when it comes to district performance and funding levels.
Democrats and education advocates say the calculations should be based on data from the Department of Education, which measures student impoverishment based on factors such as the number of students receiving subsidized school lunches or other social benefits such as Medicaid.
“It gives us a better measure of poverty among school children and their parents,” said Marc Stier, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center. “That’s really what is the determining factor on how costly it is to provide an adequate education to our school kids.”
The second set of data is based on census numbers in the broader community of a school district. That data displays lower rates of poverty, and its use would result in $721 million less funding to close adequacy gaps over the next seven years.
Republican State Representative and GOP House Education Committee Chair Jesse Topper says he believes the census data is more reliable than the data coming from school districts.
“We need to make sure that the data is accurate,” Topper said. “That it can be audited so that we can keep up with it and ensure that it continues to be accurate through the years, and we believe that the best tool right now to do that is the census data.”
According to the PPC, the Lancaster City School District would receive $31 million more over seven years using the data from the Department of Education, the third biggest jump in funding for any district compared to census data. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh school districts make up the top two.
Dauphin County and Adams County school districts would receive a combined $28.5 million more over seven years under the DOE data, while York County schools would receive $25 million more, Lancaster schools would receive $38 million more, and Adams County would receive $5.7 million more.
Lebanon and Cumberland Counties would receive more funding using the census data compared to the DOE data.
