What $440 Million Buys for Philadelphia Students

When it comes to the School District of Philadelphia, a lot of numbers get thrown around.  $440 million requested.  $216 million to keep the status quo.  $120 million sales tax.  With all these large numbers, it’s not hard to lose sight of what they mean for our children.  These are not just figures causing unbalance on the District’s ledger; they are teachers, nurses and principals.  Put simply, if the District does not get the money it needs, students will see dramatically larger classes in more dangerous schools lacking art, music, libraries and afterschool sports and clubs.

But if it does get the money it needs—all $440 million requested—the District would also look very different.  PCCY crunched the numbers and found that with that amount of money, every school could have a librarian, a counselor and a nurse, and where the schools are larger, more than one.  Instead of avoiding layoffs of  teachers, every school could have an art and a music teacher and the District could hire an additional 550 classroom teachers and 350 special education teachers, cutting its swollen classes and ensuring all students receive enough quality attention to learn.  Violent incidents would drop because the District could add 50 assistant principals to our larger schools, increase noontime aides by 100 and hire 50 more security staff along with 50 conflict resolution specialists.  Extracurricular activities like sports and clubs that had been cut down in recent years could be dramatically expanded. 

 

 If $440 million represents a fully funded district, $216 million is the threshold for not getting worse.  If the District does not receive an additional $216 million, 1,000 teaching and support positions will be eliminated.  That’s not just hundreds and hundreds of teachers receiving layoffs, but nurses, school police and special education support staff.  High school classes will be 25% larger, with more than 40 students per classroom.  Middle school classes will also hit the 40-student mark and elementary school classes will jump to 37 students per classroom.  “The $216 million is a floor that buys only what the district has right now,” the Inquirer reported, “[Superintendent Hite] is requesting $440 million to improve the schools’ bare-bones conditions.  The current level of funding does not allow for counselors or nurses in every building or adequate supplies.”

Most people will never face a nine-figure budget, so the human cost of the District’s budget deficit can get lost in the scale.  This past year has shown just how tough things have gotten for Philadelphia students, going to overfilled classes everyday in understaffed buildings, often without a nurse available to treat them.  The District needs the city to act just to maintain that status quo.  Approving the sales tax extension would go a long way to that.  But it is going to take much, much more—from the city, the state and others—to see an actual improvement.  For students in the Philadelphia School District, $440 million is not just some hypothetical budget goal.  It’s hope for a better education.

Sales Tax Split Harms Students and Hardly Helps Pensions

Everyone agrees that the School District of Philadelphia is in dire financial straits.  What they cannot agree on, however, is what they are willing to do to get out of them.  The District says it needs $216 million to avoid an additional 1,000 layoffs.  City Council has bills in front of it that would result in $195 million of funding that the District could count on every year and avoid its annual dance with fiscal disaster.  The most important of those bills would direct at least $120 million a year from an extension of the sales tax, guaranteeing the District would not again find itself in the hole it’s been in for the last few years.  Problem solved, right?  Not so fast.

According to the Inquirer, there is “no consensus [in City Council] on whether the district should receive the full $120 million from extending the sales-tax increase,” as “Council wants to split the take between schools and the city pension fund.”  Well, that makes sense; there are a number of financial issues Council wants to address and only so much money to go around.  It makes sense, at least, until you look at the numbers.  Under current legislation, the state will provide enough pension help that we hit an 80% funding target in 2030.  PCCY’s review of the city’s 2014 Actuary Value Report found that if the District splits the funding 50/50 with pension relief, we’ll be able to hit that 80% funding target in…2028.  But what about the other proposal, an incremental split?  2028 or 2029.  Here’s the kicker: to hit the pension goal a year or so earlier, it will cost the District half a billion dollars.  And it will also require the state to pass new legislation allowing it, and we all know how quickly they move on funding for Philadelphia.

Council President Darrell Clarke, in a letter to PCCY, refuted these projections and wrote, “even if City Council were to accept that these assumptions are correct, the benefits of a more responsible and balanced 50-50 split in Sales Tax revenue between SDP and the pension fund are clear based on scenarios provided by the City pension actuary.”  He then points out that under his plan, the pension fund would be considered fully funded (80%) in 2028, while it would only be at 73% at that point in the current plan.  But since he assumes a 3% (and growing) yearly jump, the pension plan would be at least at 79% funding in 2030, coming within a fraction of a percent of the funding goal without a diversion of the sales tax.  Of course projections can change, no one can fully see what the tax base will look like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years from now; that’s why they are called projections.  But the loss of $500 million will lead to certain, immediate consequences for the School District.

There are questions as to whether Clarke’s plan is even feasible.  “The problem, however, is that making any changes to what the legislature approved would require Harrisburg to act again,” the Notebook wrote.  “State leaders have been showing impatience with Philadelphia’s failure to enact the sales tax, which is hindering efforts to get the state to free up more money for the schools.”  City Council has an opportunity in front of it to go a long way to solving the District’s financial woes.  The question remains whether they will take it.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the PA Budget

PCCY has long advocated for a restoration of the nearly $1 billion cut from public education during Governor Corbett’s first year in office.  Now there is a new argument against restoring the cuts: they never happened.  In fact, the Governor and some of his supporters are claiming that he actually increased education spending by $1.5 billion.  The budget can’t be both up and down by a billion dollars, so have we been wrong all this time?  Has education spending really increased?

No.  Halfway through Governor Corbett’s new reelection ad, he claims, “State spending on public education is at the highest level ever” and cites the Commonwealth Foundation for that quote.  That should raise two red flags for anyone who pays attention to the Pennsylvania budget.  The first is that he quoted someone, rather than the actual budget.  The second is that it was the Commonwealth Foundation, the group that recently compared the School District of Philadelphia to communists building the Berlin Wall to “keep students trapped in schools,” and claimed that no spending cuts whatsoever were made in 2011.  The Governor’s citation is based on the claim that “The $1 billion in ‘cuts’ was the expiration of temporary federal stimulus money.”  Except, of course, it wasn’t.

Take, for instance, the Reimbursement of Charter School Expenditures line item.  In 2009-10, it was more than $220 million in funding, covering a large chunk of school districts’ charter expenses.  The budget clearly states that it was all state funds with no federal stimulus money.  And there were certainly no stimulus funds used going back to the 2001-2002 school year.  In 2011, the program was completely eliminated and all state funding cut.  Even the Commonwealth Foundation admits that.  So how again were no state education funds cut?

Semantics.  Pay close attention and you’ll see that the claim is that the Governor “increased spending in the education department $1.5 billion over what it was when he came into office.”  Education Department spending, not spending on education.  Newsworks points out, “When Corbett claims higher spending on education, he includes larger pension contributions, which past governors didn’t count in their calculations of education spending.”  So the increased spending he brags about is really just increased pension costs.  Pensions he has tried to cut.  Budgets can be tricky things.  If you are loose enough with your definitions, you can claim they say all kinds of things.  But changing definitions isn’t going to fill the giant budgetary hole created by the 2011 budget cuts.  The undeniable truth is that nearly $1 billion was taken out of public education and it has not been returned.  No carefully worded claims can change that.

What's Really Causing The Chaos At Bartram High?

While the city continues to reel from the assault on a conflict-resolution specialist by a student at Bartram High School, we must look at the conditions that allowed it to happen and what can be done about them.  Dangerous things can happen when you mix increasing enrollment with dropping staffing.  In the 2009-10 school year, Bartram employed about 166 staffers.  The school has been forced to cut staff every year since then.  This year that number is down to 97, a more than 40% drop since 2009-10.  That’s despite having more than 100 more students than last year.  But the problem isn’t just the cuts, but who got cut.

Many of the cuts have hit the already stretched support and discipline staffers.  PCCY’s analysis found that Bartram lost two of its three assistant principals, three of its five counselors, all four of its supportive services assistants, all three of its community relations and social services liaisons, its sole librarian, nearly all its bilingual counseling assistants, its at risk student support, one of its two school nurses, one of its six school police officers and its entire cafeteria staff.  But the move that puts students and staff most at risk might be the drop in noon time aides—the people who keep order in the school, in the cafeteria and in the halls between classes—from 64 man-hours a day down to 20.  That’s five people, working just four hours each, responsible for more than 1,000 students.

 

Obviously, the School District of Philadelphia didn’t want to make these cuts, at Bartram and elsewhere, but felt that it had to in order to save money.  But did it?  The District is in the process of converting two schools, Steel Elementary and Muñoz-Marin Elementary, into “renaissance” charter schools.  But it’s not as simple as handing over the keys.  Newsworks reports that it costs the District $4,000 per student to convert a school into a renaissance charter.  “To be clear, this isn’t money that will pour additional resources into Steel or Marin, but instead, fund the overhead costs associated with the decline in district enrollment.”  That’s $5.1 million to convert the two elementary schools.  If improving the conditions at Steel and Marin is worth eating more than $5 million to the District, why can’t they find the money to keep Bartram safely staffed?  More importantly, why is the state putting the District in a position in which some schools must suffer?

The District has many schools with conditions it needs to improve.  But year after year of underfunding from the state has left the District between Scylla and Charybdis; if it moves to avoid one problem it gets stuck with another.  We cannot pit one school against another.  Everyday, students and teachers file into understaffed schools.  If we are serious about creating a safe environment and vibrant curriculum for our students and teachers, then school funding should be the number one priority for the state.  Funding must be made available, balancing the budget by laying off support and discipline staff only leads to more problems.  Hopefully the state realizes this before the next incident.

Not Adding Up: Disparities in Access to Full Course Loads and Suspensions in Philly Schools

We have long known that disparities in access to early childhood education lead to an achievement gap later in school and in life.  Now we know that access is not the only disparity that needs to be addressed.  According to a new study by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Black students are overwhelmingly more likely to be suspended or expelled from pre-school programs.  This unfortunate trend follows them throughout their education.  Suspended students are more likely to be suspended again, more likely to repeat grades and more likely to fail to graduate.  This isn’t just a nationwide trend; it’s a major problem here in Philadelphia.

The report found that while Black children make up less than 20% of the nationwide public and charter pre-school population, they account for 42% of the students suspended once and 48% percent of the students under five with multiple suspensions.  PCCY’s analysis has found no reports of pre-school suspensions in Philadelphia in 2011, but that does not mean we are free from a discipline disparity.  Newsworks reports that in Pennsylvania, 22% of Black male students and 13% of Black female students have been suspended, while only 5% and 2% of white boys and girls, respectively, have been suspended.  Both of these figures are worse than the national averages.  Despite accounting for 56% of the School District of Philadelphia’s student body, Black students receive 74% of in-school suspensions and 72% of out-of-school suspensions.  While the roughly 15% disparity in out-of-school suspensions has stayed constant for the last two years, the 18% gap in in-school suspensions has skyrocketed from just 2% in 2009.

While we cannot yet pinpoint the cause of this discipline disparity, we do not need to look far to see the effects of racial isolation and racial inequity in high quality academic programs. PCCY also found by examining the data that 57% of all Black students in the country do not have access to a full high school course load of Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.  Though more than half of the School District of Philadelphia’s students are Black, according to PCCY’s review of the new data, only 38% of students enrolled in Calculus are Black.  Hispanic students, who make up 18% of the District, take just 6% of Calculus seats.

 

While the reasons may vary, the results are unacceptable.  Thankfully, there are no records of pre-school suspensions occurring in Philadelphia.  But the racial breakdown of suspensions later is real cause for alarm.  If we look at a group of children as offenders and not students, what chance do they have?  Perhaps the increasing level of violence noted recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer at Bartram High School is the end result of this, and may be due, in some part, to the failure of the District to ensure all students have access to the courses they need to succeed in post-secondary education.  These statistics are eye opening.  Now that our eyes are opened, Philadelphia schools need to take a good look at their policies to figure out why these discipline and achievement gaps exist and what can be done about them.

Governor Blames School Cuts on Phantom Deficit

Governor Corbett has taken a lot of heat for cutting nearly a billion dollars from education during his first year in office, money he has not yet replenished.  Recently, the Governor explained that this was necessary due to the $4 billion deficit he inherited from the Rendell Administration.  In fact, it’s a claim he’s made since first taking office: due to expiring stimulus money and irresponsible spending, he was forced to make cuts due to the giant deficit he was handed.  However, numbers revealed by the state government tell a different story.  According to the Governor’s Budget Office, he actually entered office with a billion dollar surplus in the General Fund.  There are many reasons why the Corbett Administration may have cut education funding, but balancing out a budget deficit was not one of them.

The $4 billion deficit claim is one the Governor has made often, with the AP reporting in March 2011 that “Corbett lashed out at what he called a credit-card culture in state government that left him with no choice but to cut his way out of a projected $4 billion deficit…He attacked his predecessor, Democrat Ed Rendell, for using temporary federal recession aid to increase education spending.”  He’s now released a new ad that claims, “When I ran for governor, I promised you I was going to change Harrisburg, and boy, have we. Harrisburg's job-crushing $4.2 billion deficit is now gone.”  It is true that it is gone; it was never there in the first place.  Even new SRC appointee Farah Jimenez is repeating the company line, telling Newsworks, “If you look back, the funding crisis is a more recent occurrence, it happened after the economic stimulus funding from the federal government was no longer available to us.  Prior to that, the level of monies that we had available to educate our kids is pretty much similar to what we have now.”  Except, of course, for everything Governor Corbett cut out.

So let’s look at the real numbers.  According to the Governor’s Executive Budget 2013-2014, the “Actual Beginning Balance” (their words) for 2011-12 was $1.1 billion carried over from Governor Rendell’s last year in office.  Going back to his 2012-2013 budget, the General Fund listed the same $1.1 billion surplus as Harrisburg’s “Available Beginning Balance.”  In fact, by the time Governor Corbett took office, revenues had returned to pre-recession levels.  They are currently about a billion dollars above where they were then.  So all those education cuts are going to be restored, right?  Unlikely.  Because the truth of the matter is that the Governor cut nearly a billion dollars from education for other reasons.  He needed to cover a $450 million business tax cut while still being able to tout a year end surplus of more than $600 million, so something had to go.  Despite what he and his appointees claim, there was no $4 billion deficit he had to deal with.  His own budget says as much, over and over again.  Budget crunches often force executives and legislators to make tough decisions.  But not this time.

Governor Corbett's Proposed Budget: Too Many Strings Attached for Schools

Governor Corbett recently announced his 2014-15 budget, and its focal point is an increase in education spending.  But a solution to Pennsylvania’s public school funding crisis it is not.  In fact, not only is it short of where it needs to be to meet the needs of our students, it’s still short of where it was before he cut $1 billion from it when he first took office.  The Governor’s proposal is a good place to start the budget conversation, but with early childhood education funding still 10% below pre-cut levels and grant-based regulations preventing school districts from directing the money where it’s most needed–not to mention questions about its feasibility, it cannot be the end of the conversation.

Nearly all of the new funding comes in the form of a new, $241 million “Ready to Learn” block grant program that uses a transparent formula to allocate funds to districts.  It’s a good sign that they will use a formula based on number of students, English language learners and concentration of poverty, but there’s a catch.  Poor, low performing districts will be handcuffed in how they can spend the funds.  The state is restricting the use of the funds to STEM education, tutoring and efforts to boost early literacy.  All good ideas, but it means that the school basics of rehiring classroom teachers to return class sizes to normal, nurses, counselors and librarians can’t be paid for with these funds.  Meanwhile, wealthier districts like Lower Merion will get to choose how they spend the money, with possibilities “including expanding pre-K options, extending the kindergarten school day or offering supplemental instruction in biology, English and algebra,” according to Newsworks.

The School District of Philadelphia looks to get $29 million from the block grant program.  Not only does this money come earmarked, it barely comes at all.  “The beleaguered district needs any money it can get,” the Inquirer reports, “but the new funds will not fill the hole of more than $100 million created by nonrecurring money in this year’s spending plan.”  That hole cannot be filled without additional money added to the basic education subsidy, which represents the majority of the state’s support of the district, a solution absent from the Governor’s plan.

The early education portion of Corbett’s proposal features a $10 million boost to Pre-K Counts, which could cover services for 1,670 children.  However, the Child Care Subsidy, which accounts for the vast majority of early childhood funding, is still down more than $60 million dollars from 2010-11.  That leaves early childhood education still well behind where it was when the Governor took office.

Of course, all this comes with a pretty big question.  Can the state actually find the money without raising taxes, as the Governor hopes?  “Corbett's budget plan banks on hundreds of millions of dollars in savings from yet-to-be-approved initiatives,” the Inquirer points out.  “One would rein in the cost of public-employee pensions by postponing payments until later years; another would make changes to the state's Medicaid program. The latter requires federal approval.  Both are big ifs.”  Increasing funding is a step in the right direction, as is beginning to implement a formula for education.  But ultimately this proposal needs to be a starting out point, as it does not go far enough in restoring the Governor’s cuts to education and prevents districts from using the funding in the most important ways.  Ultimately, though, it might not matter.  If the precarious funding plan is as unlikely as it seems, this might all be moot.  And it will be Pennsylvania’s children that pay the price.