GOP's Fair Funding Defense Reveals its Classism

At first, I wasn't sure I had read it right. 

“What use would a carpenter have for biology?” 

The question had been asked by a lawyer named John Krill. He had asked it of Matthew Splain, the superintendent of the rural Otto-Eldred School District in McKean County.

Splain is also the president of the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, which is one of the plaintiffs in a much-watched case being now being argued in a Harrisburg courtroom.

In their lawsuit, Splain and his fellow plaintiffs assert that the Keystone State's ridiculously unfair system for funding public education is not only, well, ridiculously unfair, but also a violation of the state Constitution.

That Pennsylvania's school funding system is unfair was established right after the ironically named "fair funding formula" was adopted and immediately ignored for all but new school funding, meaning poorer districts, like Pottstown, get far less in state funding than the formula says they are entitled to receive.

As we've written in this space before, Pottstown gets $13 million less every year from the state than the formula says it should to put it s students on an even playing field with those in wealthier districts. 

Although the formula's money is still missing, the creation of that formula provided the basis for an apples-to-apples -- or rather a student-to-student -- comparison of school funding. And that's where the Constitution comes in.

The Pennsylvania Constitution includes a clause requiring that the state provide a "thorough and efficient" system of public education. 

Our state, ranked near the bottom on the national list of fair public education funding, is trapped in a system that relies heavily on property taxes, meaning wealthy school districts have more money to spend on education.

It means a lot of other things too -- like the state's elected officials get to hoard money and boast they haven't raised state taxes and then turn around and blame state-mandate-burdened school districts for local tax hikes.

It also means poorer districts-- often with  higher minority populations, which struggle to provide resources to students already starting school with all the disadvantages poverty imposes -- must then tax their lower-income communities at a higher rate just to provide basics.

All too often, extras like well-equipped athletic facilities, advanced placement courses or even adequate bathrooms are beyond their budgets.

The racial injustice embedded in this ongoing theft of student potential is so pronounced that POWER In Faith, a faith-based advocacy group fighting for fair funding, calls it, accurately, "educational apartheid."

So one might expect that the lawyer defending the system wedged in gridlock by the General Assembly's Republican majority would not be so tone deaf as to suggest that poorer students have no need of an adequate education.

Krill's question evoked the kind of whiny question we all used to hear asked in middle school: "Why do I need to know when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed?" or "When are we ever going to use algebra in the real world?"

Not to be outdone by petulant middle schoolers, Krill took their complaint to the highest levels of Pennsylvania jurisprudence and asked Splain to explain "what use would someone on the McDonald's career track have for algebra 1?"

After doubling down, to my amazement, he went for the tri-fecta.

“Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many needs," Krill said. "There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”

First, join me in resisting the temptation to remark on the inevitably irony of a highly paid lawyer presenting himself as an expert on what working class folks need to know thinking that pizzas get flipped.

Our time together is short, so let's move on to the more disturbing implications of what Krill is saying.

It would seem that rather than argue that Pennsylvania does in fact provide the "thorough and efficient system of education" the Constitution requires, Krill, who represents Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-34th Dist., is essentially arguing "who cares if it doesn't? So what?"

There's a disturbing kind of circular logic at work here: "Why should we spend money making education funding equitable when our failure to do so will ensure you'll never need it?"

He might as well argue "why should Pennsylvania help feed low-income families when they're already starving their kids?"

Breathe.....

Let's forget for a moment that this is a country where children are told "you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. You could be president if you want." Because now, John Krill has already decided that kid's going to end up "flipping pizzas," whatever the hell that's supposed to be.

Let's forget for a moment that Thomas Jefferson believed "That talent and virtue, needed in a free society, should be educated regardless of wealth, birth or other accidental condition; That other children of the poor must thus be educated at common expence."

Let's forget for a moment that John Adams believed "The education here intended is not merely that of the children of the rich and noble, but of every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest. It is not too much to say that schools for the education of all should be placed at convenient distances, and maintained at the public expense."

And let's forget for a moment that the prescient lawyer who argues poor kids can't succeed and don't need to learn stuff represents a public official who was first elected to his seat in 1998 -- no doubt entirely on merit -- only after daddy Corman retired from it; a true self-made man.

Let us never forget, however, that the courtroom defense the Republican majority selected to defend its policy of failing to follow the dictates of the nation's founders; of refusing to provide equity to poorer, darker-skinned schools; of failing to fund its own fair funding formula is quite simply that "some kids aren't worth it, and mostly, they're poor and Black."

The privilege-infused arrogance of that kind of thinking as a defense of a public policy that undermines the core of the American Dream -- that every child has an equal chance to succeed -- before they can even get up on their feet is not only morally repugnant, but destined to cost more than actually funding education fairly ever would.

After all, the classroom-to-prison-cell pipeline we have now in Pennsylvania continues to cost millions more than a classroom-to-successful-citizen pipeline ever would.

Just ask Benjamin Franklin: "general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of youth, than from exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured."

Thankfully, since old Ben isn't around to ask, we have Margie Wakelin, a lawyer for the Education Law Center representing the plaintiffs, who was on hand to follow up with Splain.

She asked why it might be useful to America to have a future "pizza flipper" know algebra or a future carpenter know biology.

Sadly, Splain had to spell out what Krill can't seem to understand: “We obviously can’t predict what our students will have interest in,” or what careers they might pursue, he said.

Further, giving a timely example of the founders' belief that having well-educated, well-informed citizens makes for a more stable Republic, Splain agreed with Wakelin that it's best "for a retail worker 'to understand basic biology of viruses during a global pandemic' — to decide whether to get a vaccine, what steps to take to keep a business open, or to send children to school for in-person learning," as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Of course, a well-educated, well-informed citizenry in all walks of life capable of critical thinking is the lifeblood of a Republic and necessary for a society whose system of government requires voters to be able to see through the kind of venomous bullshit Jake Corman's lawyer was spewing in that courtroom.

And who could be against that? 

Certainly not the party that values children growing up with the ability to be self-made, to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" and to lift themselves out of poverty....

So yeah, I guess I did read it right after all.