The Commonwealth Triple-Screw: Special Education Funding & Charter School Payments in Pennsylvania
This post is the second in a series (of unknown number) focusing on how states harm local public school districts through illogical, ill-conceived state school finance systems and components of those systems. One goal of this post is to illustrate the types of problems/manipulations that exist in state school finance systems, how they work, and the severity of the problems they can cause. I have written previously, for example, how states find ways to actually use state aid to make their finance systems less equitable (school finance pork). I have also written about policies like census based financing of special education and it’s adverse effects on high need districts. The Commonwealth Triple-Screw takes it to another level.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country.Pennsylvania operates a school funding system that on average provides systematically less state and local revenue per pupil to the state’s highest need large and mid-size city districts. Among the nation’s most
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country.Pennsylvania operates a school funding system that on average provides systematically less state and local revenue per pupil to the state’s highest need large and mid-size city districts. Among the nation’s most