This paper updates the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center’s analysis of the inadequacy and inequity in school funding to take into account the 2022-23 budget enacted at the end of June 2022. Our conclusion is that, despite the substantial $850 million addition to basic education funding and Level Up funding this year, Pennsylvania’s K-12 school districts remain both inadequately and inequitably funded. The funding gap between rich and poor school districts, as well as those with a large and small share of Black and Hispanic students, remains deeply wrong from both a moral and pragmatic point of view. These inequities are fundamentally unfair—as is the harm done to the long-term prospects of too many of our kids and to the Pennsylvania economy as a whole.[1]
[1]. This paper draws and updates previous research by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. See Marc Stier, Eugene Henninger-Voss, Diana Polson, and Stephen Herzenberg, Economic, Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Pennsylvania School Funding, Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, November 11, 2021, and our series of annual analyses of the PA Budget. Most recently, that is: Diana Polson and Marc Stier, Flush With Cash: Will Pennsylvania Invest in Our Future?, Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, March 16, 2022.