Fail students and blame them at the same time

The fair funding lawsuit takes another step forward on March 7, 2018 when the Commonwealth Court will hear objections filed by PA House and Senate Majority Leaders Turzai and Scarnati.

To say that their well-heeled objections remain as offensive and ludicrous as they were the first time around would be an understatement.

PA legislators are expected to argue that Pennsylvania’s students have no fundamental right to an education under the State’s constitution, that the case for education funding is moot because the state adopted a funding formula, and that if districts are underfunded, kids aren’t harmed and districts share a part of the blame because they can choose how to allocate resources.

Particularly appalling? When voters (and legislators, for that matter) know full well the State’s track record for underfunding schools and are well past the point of arguing that funding matters, State Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R-25) offers a rather tone-deaf response: He blames the kids.

Citing a 2000 case from North Carolina, “after all, the fact that a student does not pass a standardized test or is unprepared to compete in the workplace may not be due to school officials’ actions, but rather to the student’s intellectual ability, lack of self-discipline, lack of parental support or other social or environmental factors.”

First of all, no one has argued that poor performance of PA students is due to the actions of school officials—voters have correctly pointed the finger of blame at irresponsible legislators and their collective failure to adequately fund education.

Secondly, if it were one student struggling, that would be one thing. But only 61% of students passed English and only 42% passed math in the 2017 PSSAs.

That’s thousands more than a one student case. In fact, that’s 428,865 students that failed math. And the State is constitutionally responsible for all of them.

The fact that these issues must be argued before a court of law to get resolved speaks volumes as to the problems with how education is funded in the state of Pennsylvania.

Few would agree that if you put 100 pieces of a 500 piece puzzle together, you’ve solved it.

So, how can PA’s legislature expect the Court to buy into the belief that our kids are not entitled to a good education or that a fair funding formula, that has never actually been funded properly, can erase generations of inequities in classrooms across the state’s 500 districts?

The Court has already found that it must “take great care in wading deeply into questions of social and economic policy, which we long have recognized as fitting poorly with the judiciary’s institutional competencies”.

We expect our children to graduate with competency.

We implore the Court to continue to exhibit that same level of competency and uphold the rights of our children. 

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Join PCCY on March 7, 2018, at Stand with School Children of Pennsylvania, to attend the hearing and following press conference at City Hall by the Octavious Catto statue on the South Side.
RSVP by March 5 by FOLLOWING THIS LINK or contact Tomea at tomeas@childrenfirstpa.org