Education Needs to Be a Priority in the State Budget

Sometime within the next six weeks or so, the State Legislature will pass a state budget for the upcoming year.

With the Republican party holding a 30-20 majority in the Senate, a whopping 111-90 majority in the House, plus Tom Corbett in the governor’s mansion, the state budget has become a strictly one-party affair. Democratic House and Senate members have virtually no input whatsoever in how Pennsylvania spends its money; we aren’t even in the room while the discussions are being held.

Remember that unlike Congress at the federal level, the Pennsylvania Constitution clearly requires balanced budgets every year, which is why you never hear me talking about a debt ceiling or deficit spending problems. So all this talk about “needing to live within our means” is more political rhetoric than reality; by law, we are basically forced to live within our means every year.

The key word to remember when thinking about the state budget (which probably impacts you in more ways than you realize) is priorities. Using Gov. Corbett’s budget proposal from February as a blueprint for what’s to come, I can say with certainty that this budget fails to recognize the proper priorities for Pennsylvania. We could make lots of improvements on this budget proposal without raising your taxes if we had better priorities on how to spend what money we have, and no area of the budget reflects poor priorities more than the continued slashing of education funding.

Next year, school districts will get $100 million less funding than in the current year under the governor’s plan. Gov. Corbett’s first budget, passed last year, cut school funding by nearly $1 billion.

Despite the talking points you may hear, there is less state funding for basic education (K-12) now than there was before the federal stimulus. Despite Gov. Corbett’s claims of increasing education funding to school districts, the reality is that funding for classroom education goes down across the board. But don’t take my word for it; ask any school board member in the state if you don’t believe me.

School property taxes are going up across the state because of Gov. Corbett’s nearly $1 billion in cuts to public schools. Property owners are paying more for education because the state isn’t meeting its share; the numbers speak for themselves. This year alone, 197 school districts (out of 500) received permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Education to raise property taxes without seeking voter approval.

Many school districts use state funds for early learning education like full-day kindergarten. Law enforcement leaders say high-quality early childhood education helps to reduce crime and lower prison costs, but these budget proposals increase prison spending while reducing education funding. Yet Gov. Corbett backfilled lost stimulus funding in the Department of Corrections, but not for the Department of Education.

The average cost per student per year is approximately $14,000; the average cost per inmate per year is approximately $35,000, meaning the governor plans to spend twice as much on prisons compared to higher education in his latest budget proposal. To make matters worse, these education cuts resulted in 14,000 jobs lost in our public schools.

Even worse are the “solutions”—wonderful-sounding ideas such as Gov. Corbett’s Student Achievement Education Block Grant, a proposal which has nothing to do with students or achievement. It’s really about pushing more funding responsibility away from the state and onto local property owners by lumping the state’s legally required transportation and Social Security payments into the block grant, which distorts the funding picture. By eliminating the formula-funded transportation funding, schools will be on their own to pay for increasing gas costs, which means they will need more money from local property taxes.

Some have speculated (and I’m not convinced they’re wrong) that the end game is to defund public schools to make school vouchers seem more appealing, which certainly wouldn’t hurt some of the wealthy campaign contributors who stand to make millions in taxpayer dollars from a voucher program—but I’ll leave the speculation to you. All I know is I cannot support a state budget proposal that lowers education quality while raising our property taxes; those are the wrong priorities for Pennsylvania students and taxpayers.