So are school districts getting more money than in previous years under Gov. Tom Corbett’s money, or are they getting less money?
Yes.
Getting a handle on how much money is at stake in Pennsylvania’s budget politics can depend on what time frame you set it in, who is getting it, where it’s going, where it came from and where it used to come from.
So it’s not unexpected that a variety of sources paint a variety of pictures about Corbett’s 2012-13 education budget.
At the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, the budget picture is being set in a 15-year time frame and shows that K-12 spending “has dramatically increased in Pennsylvania over the last 15 years.
The organization’s 
most recent position paper notes that “student enrollment has decreased by 35,510 since 2000, while schools have hired 35,821 more staff.”
From $13 billion in 1995-96 to $26 billion in 2009-10, the increase “represents a 44 percent increase.”
But that figure includes school construction and debt spending, which “has more than doubled in the last 15 years, increasing by 140 percent” and also does not take into account the two most recent budgets, Corbett’s first and the one he has proposed for the coming school year.
Nevertheless, contrary to what advocates for low-income communities argue, the Commonwealth Foundation cites a 2010 study by 21st Century Partnership for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education comparing 11th grade math, reading and science scores which “found low-spending districts often out-perform high-spending ones.”
But go to the website paid for by the Pennsylvania State Education Association and you will find information focused specifically on the last two years of the education budget under Corbett. It features a database where you can check to see how your district fares under Corbett’s proposed budget for 2012-13.
That site shows numbers indicating Pottstown has lost about $2 million in state funding since 2010-2011.
It’s analysis of school funding in Montgomery County shows Pottstown enduring a state funding cut of nearly 18 percent over last year and Corbett’s proposal this year — the second highest loss of Montgomery County’s 22 school districts, second only to Norristown’s 24 percent loss — while Lower Merion ranks sixth on that list as the district that made out the best, losing just over 10 percent of its state funding.
“After cutting $860 million from PA public schools last year, Gov. Corbett calls for additional cuts in his proposed 2012-2013 state budget,” the Save PA Schools site insists. “This year, the governor is using accounting tricks and a complicated fiscal shell game to make it look like public school funding is increasing.”
Again, it depends on how you look at it.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s budget website, Corbett’s budget represents “the largest amount of state funding in Pennsylvania history.”
It shows Pottstown enjoying a 4.38 percent increase in state funding under Corbett’s plan.
(But the gap between wealthy districts and poorer ones like Pottstown as outlined by the Education Law Center analysis remains. Even in the state’s rosier numbers, Lower Merion School District fares much better, enjoying an increase in state funding of nearly 16 percent under Corbett’s plan.)
But will that be reflected in the classroom? Not likely, reports an Allentown newspaper.
An analysis headlined “ Corbett’s education spending hike covers pensions, not books ,” The Morning Call newspaper reports that the state site is able to show an increase in state funding by including increased payments to cover its obligations to the state pension fund for educators.
Reporters Steve Esack and John L. Micek wrote that the state’s own site “shows the vast majority of Corbett’s $338.1 million, or 3.7 percent, increase in education spending would not go toward classroom learning as his administration claims. It would go to cover the state’s mandatory increase in its share of public school employees’ retirement payments, which originated in the Legislature’s 2001 decision to increase pensions for its members and all state employees.”
Nevertheless, they do conclude there is an increase in student-related spending — “less than half a percent.”
And Corbett’s “lumping together” of separate budget lines for basic education, special education, transportation and Social Security is apparently duplicated in other places in the education budget as well.
“Corbett is the first governor in state history to lump mandatory pension payments into what had been separate funding streams for regular education programming,” they wrote. “That methodology has increased the bottom line while fueling concern among unions and school board members that it is obscuring the truth.”
Truth, it would appear, is in the eye of the beholder — or of the presenter.
What seems clear to Brett Schaeffer, director of communications for the Education Law Center, is that no matter which set of numbers you look at, state funding in the past two years clearly favors wealthier districts and undercuts districts that have the most expensive students to educate and a tax base least able to pay for it.
“It’s about how its distributed,” Schaeffer said said of state funding. Even when the numbers are shifted and certain budget lines included or excluded, they cannot hide the overall trend.
“The role of state funding should be to narrow the resource gaps between school districts so that learning opportunities are roughly equivalent for all children, regardless of where they live,” the ELC center report concluded.
“Every school should have qualified teachers, modern libraries and science labs. But high-poverty communities simply do not have the local wealth or tax base to do it on their own,” the report said.
As a result, “urban schools, many declining first-line suburbs, fast-growing districts, and other under-funded public schools must get the biggest slices of the state funding pie,” the report said.
“State officials,” the report insisted, “should not give more money only to a few hand-picked communities based on political considerations, and also should not spread around the limited budget so that everyone gets the same amount.”
Rather, “the school districts with the greatest needs must get more funding, compared to districts that are wealthier, are shrinking in size, or have fewer costly at-risk students.”
If funding decisions are “based primarily on political considers,” as the report insists happened with Corbett’s first budget and “greatly widened the resource gap between rich and poor schools,” then “we will all pay the price in terms of higher rates of drop-outs, unemployment, crime, welfare dependency and civic discord.”