By Evan Brandt, ebrandt@21st-centurymedia.com, @PottstownNews on Twitter
Originally published:
POTTSTOWN >> People objecting to Pennsylvania’s status as the state with the widest gap between funding for rich and poor school districts have argued that a zip code all-too-often determines the quality of a student’s education.
Apparently the color of a student’s skin matters even more.
New research has found that the less white a district’s students are, the more unfair the funding gap in state basic education dollars.
The discovery was made by two separate fair funding advocacy groups as they began applying Pennsylvania’s new “fair funding formula” to the finances of the state’s 500 school districts.
Because the state is only putting 6 percent of its total education funding through the formula, researchers at the Education Law Center and POWER (Philadelphia Organized to Witness Empower and Rebuild) wanted to see what funding would look like for poorer districts if all the state’s education funding were distributed using the formula.
As expected, they found that applying the formula to all state funding would significantly change the education dynamic in Pennsylvania for poorer districts, boosting state aid and, consequently, opportunity for students who generally begin school further down the learning curve than their wealthier peers.
But they also found that while poverty is certainly a factor statewide in determining how much per-student aid a school district gets, it turns out to be less of a predictor than race…
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