Get on the Bus June 12, Fight Education Apartheid

Photos by Evan Brandt

Kelly Grosser, Youth Program Director for YWCA Tri-County Area, with a chart indicating that Pennsylvania, represented by the long blue line at the far left, has the worst gap between poor and wealthy school districts in the nation. More than twice as bad as the next worst state.

Knowing that Pennsylvania's funding gap between rich and poor school districts is the worst in the nation makes Kelly Grosser angry.

"It's despicable," said Grosser during a May 20 "Education Equity" workshop at Montgomery County

Community College's West Campus in Pottstown.

Grosser, youth program director for YWCA Tri-County Area, get's even angrier when she talks about the fact that even when school districts have a similar poverty level, the state funding system provides more dollars per student the whiter the district is.

"How do they sleep at night?"

She was talking about state legislators who, by failing to apply Pennsylvania's Fair School Funding formula to ALL public education, perpetuate this racial inequity in Pennsylvania's public education funding.

She showed this 2017 video by researcher David Mosenkis, who discovered the racial bias while researching what complete use of the fair funding formula would look like. Have a look:



As I reported two years ago, his findings have been confirmed in a second study in 2017 by the Education Law Center titled "Money Matters in Education Justice."

“Poor communities of color thus face several layers of inequity as a result of Pennsylvania’s school funding system,” according to the Education Law Center report. “They shoulder the highest local tax burden and yet still receive less state aid per student than similarly situated, whiter districts.”

"The racial aspect of this is not new," Grosser said sadly, although it is perhaps newly revealed.

"Whether you look at racial inequity in the prison system, or in housing, it's sad to say but this country has not progressed as far as we once believed," said Grosser.

The second cause of this moral stain on Pennsylvania's already tarnished educational reputation is

In 2017, Mosenkis built this chart showing that despite
similar levels of poverty, Mahanoy Area School District in
Schuylkill County gets more than its fair share of state
education funding than Pottstown. Mahanoy city is 85.5%
white. Pottstown is 39% white.

another innocuous government term called "hold harmless."

This is how the fair funding formula got passed in the first place, by pledging to all state legislators that the school districts they represent would never receive less state education funding than they already do.

One problem with this flawed philosophy is it gets harder to justify when you ask the question: what happens when a school district continues to lose population? Should it still be getting the same level of state funding for fewer students?

Grosser explained "hold harmless" this way: "If a district got $2 million, and then lost half their students, which has happened slowly to districts in the center of the state, they still get $2 million, despite having half as many students."

That's the case in many central parts of the state which also happen to have much smaller minority populations. Thus as a whiter population gets smaller in these districts, the state education dollars per white student ratio rises.

“On average, the whitest districts gets thousands of dollars more than their fair share for each student, while the least-white districts get thousands less for each student than their fair share,” Moseknis wrote in his 2016 study.

It's so systemic, Mosenkis can demonstrate that for every 10 percent increase in the white portion of the population, a district gets $447 more per student on average.

Something so embedded in the system is reminiscent of another racially based government system decried the world over. Which is perhaps why POWER and other advocates for fair funding have taken to calling Pennsylvania's public education funding system "Education Apartheid."

As Mosenkis told me when I first wrote about this in 2017:

“I doubt very much this situation exists by design,” said Mosenkis. “I don’t think people got together in a back room and said ‘let’s discriminate against students of color.’”

David Mosenkis

However, “the fact of the matter is white people are better connected. They have more
political clout and when they are doing their best to exercise their influence, this is likely to happen.”

What matters now, he said, is what gets done about it.

“I can forgive historical, accidental dispersing of education funding,” he said. “But now that we have shone a light on its existence, now that we know there is a systemic bias that favors white populations, there is no excuse for not fixing it.”

"Hold Harmless" is the mechanism for that excuse. It's a friendly sounding phrase until you consider that the system being kept in place has been harming poorer, blacker school districts for decades.

“If you look at it on a per-student basis, the larger districts are the ones getting less of their fair share, but they represent the majority of the students in the state,” Mosenkis told me in 2017.

He rejects the Harrisburg trope that changing the distribution of school dollars would constitute “harm to some districts to help others. Because that defines ‘no harm’ as the status quo, when the majority of students in Pennsylvania are harmed by the status quo. To not change this system so that all education funding goes through the fair funding formula is to say systemically that some students are more deserving of resources than others.”

Districts that have been getting more of their fair share for decades have built up very comfortable fund balances, so the "harm" they would experience from getting less education funding than the year before could be mitigated by their sizable savings, said Grosser.

Grosser shows that the absence of full fair funding mostly affects
school districts in Southeast Pennsylvania. And while they may
represent a minority of school districts, they represent a
majority of the state's public school students, 52% in fact.

What's stopping progress on this issue is that many of the Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania Legislature (the GOP controls both houses) represent districts where school funding would diminish if the fair funding formula were to be fully implemented.

Vote for a bill that cuts funding to their home schools and those legislators' chances for reelection sink through the floor.

Just one person, House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-28th Dist., can keep a bill that would fix all these inequities from coming to the floor.

Turzai has represented this Allegheney County House district since 2001. That district is 90 percent white.

And what about districts like Pottstown, short-changed by $13 million the formula says it needs each year to give its students a level playing field; where local taxes skyrocket in communities that can least afford it?

What keeps Pottstown from "storming the gates in Harrisburg?" as Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez said May 9 to a group of parents and students worried budget constraints would cause cuts to the district's storied music program?

Ashley Faison, left, and Sheri McDonald, both of whom work for the
YWCA Tri-County Area, at a 2017 fair funding rally at Pottstown High.

The answer is as obvious as it is painful: they don't know what they're missing.

Kids who go to school in under-resourced school districts, are often amazed when they visit a neighboring school in a wealthier community and see all the resources available, said Ashley Faison, volunteer and advocacy manager for the YWCA.

Sheri McDonald, YWCA's chief mission impact officer, says her children attend Spring-Ford schools and the difference she sees in what resources and opportunities are available there, and how much less Pottstown has available, is a stark one.

Charlotte, Chris and Collin Stone at tended the May 20 Equity
in Education Workshop to learn more about the issues and
to learn what they can do to help.

Brother and sister Charlotte and Chris Stone can attest to that.

Charlotte, a 2015 graduate of Pottstown High School said she was amazed to hear about resources other students had access to when she went to college.

Her brother Chris, a 2017 graduate is now at Villanova University and said he saw the same thing.

Hearing stories about what his classmates had at their high schools, highlights what they have and Pottstown does not, he said.

So all of this laying out of the problem begs the question: what can we do to make it right?

State Rep. Chris Rabb, D-200th Dist., has the answer. It's called House Bill 961.

Chris Rabb, D-200th Dist.

An alum of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, Rabb defeated the Democratic machine-supported incumbent  state Rep. Tonyelle Cook-Artis in the 2017 primary and is now taking Harrisburg by storm.

(Perhaps not surprising when you consider Rabb was instrumental in getting the image of a shackled slave removed from the Common Room of Yale's Calhoun College, a college whose name was subsequently changed to honor the legacy of trailblazing computer scientist and mathematician, Grace Murray Hopper.)

His bill calls for all public school education funding in Pennsylvania to be calculated using the fair funding formula.

Right now.

That means an additional $13 million for Pottstown Schools WITHOUT raising the local tax rate. In fact, the school board could do something remarkable and lower local property taxes with that kind of additional funding.

Imagine how much easier it would be to revitalize Pottstown with this message to investors and families: "We lowered property taxes and improved the schools!"

On May 17, the same day of the historic Brown V. Board of education decision that outlawed "separate but equal," Rabb held a news conference to discuss the disparities that still exist in the way Pennsylvania funds public education and promote Bill 961.



“We're only getting 9 percent of educational justice," Rabb said in reference to the portion of Pennsylvania education funding that is distributed via the fair funding formula.

Rabb visited Pottstown on April 15, after hearing Rodriguez testify about the impact Pennsylvania's unfair funding has on our district.

Suffice it to say, The Mercury has been writing editorials about
this injustice for some time. We did it again on Sunday.

"Just literally a few minutes drive from here, there is a school district which gets $3,500 more per student, per year," Rabb while in Pottstown.

"And they were telling me about all the things they could do with that money, not frills. Things like offering more foreign languages, more staffing, and I'm going to try to bring them to Harrisburg to speak to many of my colleagues who don't quite understand how important it is to fund our schools equitably."

House Bill 961 has 56 co-sponsors and needs 102 votes to pass.

A group of Pottstown-area residents, known as Advocates for Pottstown Schools, have been pushing for co-sponsors to the bill.

Newly elected state Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-146th Dist., a former member of the Spring-Ford School Board, is a co-sponsor and an enthusiastic supporter, telling a crowd recently that Pottstown is Pennsylvania's fifth most underfunded district in the state.



"It's nearly $14 million this district is underfunded; the fifth most under-funded district in the 500 school districts in Pennsylvania," he said.

"It's a disgrace," Ciresi said. "It needs to end. And it needs to end this year."

Photo stolen shamelessly from Facebook
From left, Laura Johnson, Lisa Stephenson-Horne and
Paula Nealy-Corson meet with state Rep. Tim Hennessey
to get his support for HB 961

And the advocates recently scored a significant victory by getting state Rep. Tim Hennessey, R-26th Dist., to sign on as a co-sponsor as well.

The group has an active Facebook page where it offers daily tips and "action items," which just take a few minutes but can make a huge difference.

And it's been working. The page shows a steady stream of legislators signing on as co-sponsors.

Activist and Pottstown School Board candidate Laura Johnson said an analysis shows that the majority of legislators would see the majority of their students benefit by applying the fair funding formula to all public education funding, making their refusal to act all the more frustrating.
And Rodriguez suggests giving state Rep. Turzai a call as well, to let him know that keeping a bill with this many co-sponsorships from a vote on the floor will not be tolerated.

"If Speaker Turzai decides that bill is not going to make it to the floor, if we don't have the opportunity to get a hearing; if we don't have the opportunity for it to go the education committee for it to actually get to the House, even though we have 56 co-spsonsors for the bill and only need 102 votes for it to pass, one person can keep that from going to the floor," Rodriguez said.

You can email Turzai at mturzai@pahousegop.com or give him a call in Harrisburg at (717) 772-9943. Or if you really want to hit him where he lives, call where he lives, his district office can be reached at (412) 369-2230.

And if you're at a loss for words, Advocates for Pottstown Schools has a helpful script.

The group has also mobilized local faith leaders to co-sign a letter of support for the bill which was published in The Mercury and other newspapers around the state. You can read the full letter, which currently has 41 signatures, by clicking here.

"We recognize that while all people have been created equal, they don’t all receive equal opportunities to succeed," the letter states. "The children of Pottstown, along with the rest of the 52 percent of Pennsylvania children who live in underfunded districts, deserve to be supported with an equitable investment that accounts for their needs. When we invest in kids’ lives and their education, the payoff is tremendous for decades to come. We will see more hopeful communities, spiritually and physically healthier individuals, a prepared workforce, and reduced crime and incarceration."

But sometimes, a message is best delivered in person.

That's why POWER and other advocates have organized a Take Action Against Education Apartheid rally on June 12, and free buses to get you there.

The buses leave Pottstown High School, 750 N Washington St, at 9:30 a.m.

You can help them know how many buses they need by signing up. Do so by clicking here.

For more information  contact the event’s lead organizer Nathan Sooy (nsooy@powerphiladelphia.org).

Rodriguez said: "On June 12, I will be in Harrisburg. If you want to come with me, I'll figure out how to get the buses and we will storm the gates," he told those attending a May 9 school board meeting to discuss budget cuts.

"And when I say we'll storm the gates, I don't mean for nothing. We've been working for years on something that will actually change the bottom line, so write this down. House Bill 961 calls for 100 percent use of the Fair Funding Formula," said Rodriguez.

"You have to go to Harrisburg, there's really no excuse," Ciresi told the crowd gathered May 16 to protest possible cuts to Pottstown's music program, cuts the school board rejected.

Stephen Rodriguez, no stranger to speaking out for fair funding,
was on the steps of the capitol last year as well.

While the rally is necessary, so too is sustained pressure, said Rodriguez.

"Don't just think that one day is going to change everything. Take some time and call a legislator. Call Speaker Turzai," he said.

All these things are important, said Rodriguez, because all are required to bring about change:

"This is the morally right thing to do, it's not about money, it's about students," he said. "And until people understand that we are not begging for money, we are fighting for students, nothing will change."



Education Apartheid