Their policies have ignored the fiscal realities and implied that schools serving students in low-wealth communities are performing inadequately, as a slight of hand to justify backing away from the constitutional responsibility to educate all children in Pennsylvania. Certainly the children in the 218 school districts whose future is shortchanged by the disparity in education funding in Pennsylvania have won nothing and will continue to suffer. The extreme disparity of funding in these districts, brought on by the inadequate tax base of many urban and rural communities, has resulted in serious educational inequities to thousands of children. Neither the General Assembly, nor any governor in more than two decades, has addressed the problem. There can be no more serious policy question before the Commonwealth.
Public education is the only service mandated by our state government.
Eluding the judicial review of the facts and the governor's demagoguery however, is the ever-shrinking percentage of state aid in proportion to the total cost of education. Once at nearly 50 percent, today state aid makes up only about 32 percent of the total costs of K-12 expenditures. That means low-wealth districts must make up the remaining costs from a local tax base which has remained stagnant for the last 25 years. Despite recent reform measures providing for different options on how to generate revenue from the same tax base, many of these communities simply lack the means to fund a 21st century school system. Pennsylvania's excessive reliance on property taxes forces poorer urban and rural school districts to tax its residents heavily while generating less revenue than affluent suburban districts.