School Finance Policies, Racial Disparities, and the Exploding Educational Debt: Egregious Evidence from Pennsylvania

Abstract

This article examines how three relatively recent decisions enacted and upheld by Pennsylvania lawmakers have increased racial disparities in education funding and are helping to explode what Ladson-Billings has termed the educational debt. We find that districts with the highest concentrations of Black and Latinx students are profoundly underfunded. We find that these districts spent $2 billion less than they needed—according to calculations lawmakers enacted into state law in 2008—for their students to have a chance to meet the standards the state set for them. We also find that these districts would have received an additional $1.4 billion in state aid to help them address this underfunding if lawmakers had not abandoned a 2008 formula and an additional $918 million in state funding if lawmakers had used current formulas to distribute their two largest subsidies to school districts. We find that a vast majority of children in Pennsylvania are harmed by these policies. We also find that Black and Latinx students are being particularly shortchanged. We find that districts with the largest proportions of Black and Latinx students are harmed at substantially higher rates than districts with the lowest proportions of Black and Latinx students, even after we restrict our comparison to higher-poverty districts.