Shapiro School Budget ‘A Step Backwards’ For Poor Students: Advocates

HARRISBURG, PA — Though widely lauded from his party's establishment, Gov. Josh Shapiro's much discussed billion dollar budget increase for education would add no new funding for the state's poorest districts, and advocacy groups say it ignores what has become a civil and human rights issue in some Pennsylvania schools.

Shapiro's proposed 2023 budget is designed only to keep school funding on pace with historic inflation rates, according to a coalition of legal and community organizing groups calling for greater attention to public education in Pennsylvania.

"This year’s proposed education budget does not do enough to meet the standard set by our state constitution and the urgency of this moment," the Education Law Center, Public Interest Law Center, and the law firm O’Melveny and Myers said in a statement. "The moment calls for more."

The new budget "takes a step backwards" in addressing the issues at the root of the problem, specifically by not providing sorely needed additional support for the "Level Up" program.

Funding for this program is included, but it merely allows districts to “barely tread water,” Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of PA, said in response to the budget.

“The absence of a Level Up supplement for Pennsylvania’s 100 poorest districts is both disappointing and puzzling,” she added.

Shapiro's 2023-24 budget is a 7.8 increase in basic education funding, but that only keeps it, as Shapiro's budget brief puts it, "on par with recent inflationary and cost-of-living growth."

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Advocates take particular issue with the lack of further increase this year because of a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruling in February that declared that Pennsylvania’s school funding system shortchanges the poorest districts and is unconstitutional. The court ordered the governor and legislature to fix the issue, and the Public Interest Law Center and others say that Shapiro's budget maintains the status quo, at best.

"The governor knows full well that Pennsylvania has allowed school districts in the least wealthy areas of the state to languish," Bishop Dwyane Royster, the executive director of the nonprofit Power Interfaith, said in a statement. "We know that the quality of a student's education should not be determined by their zip code, family income, or skin color."

Level Up needs at least $400 million in funding, Royster and others argue, to address the unconstituional injustice which is a present reality in impoverished communities around the state.

During his budget address, Shapiro called last month's court decision a "call to action." The chamber of majority Democrats applauded shortly thereafter.

The Commonwealth Court's ruling came after the suit argued the state's poorest districts are underfunded by about $4.6 billion.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the proposed budget would slash funding for Level Up. Rather, it does not add any additional funding in a year that saw a historic rise in inflation. The error has been corrected.

Shapiro's full budget address can be watched online here and details of the proposed budget have been organized here.