Whose side are you on?

Six school districts, families and the NAACP are suing the leaders of the state House and Senate, the Governor, the Secretary and Department of Education and the State Board of Education for failing to provide an adequate publicly funded education system.

But is this even necessary? And do they have a chance winning?

The answer to both questions is a resounding yes.

Students have every right to expect the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to provide and maintain a strong public education system. When kids are at school, they should be in safe, resourced buildings, in classes that aren’t crowded, stocked with up-to-date textbooks. There should be guidance counselors, nurses, a school library, and additional services available to help them if they’re struggling academically and further their education after high school.

This isn’t just a moral argument. It’s a legal one.

The state Constitution made legislators responsible for delivering essential resources students need to succeed.

But across Pennsylvania, our publically funded schools just don’t have the basic resources required and children are regularly denied the education the state Constitution demands the Governor and General Assembly to provide.

Last year in Commonwealth Court, the lawyer representing the House and Senate had a decidedly different interpretation of what constitutes an adequate education system, arguing schools where the lights work are all that is required.

“I believe as long as public schools are in place … they have fulfilled their constitutional duty,” the lawyer for legislators said.

We now know we need a $3.2 billion injection into our faltering education system just to reach the level where students can succeed, according to the Public Interest Law Center.

Not only are schools under resourced, they are funded nonsensically and unfairly.

Case in point: This year finally saw the vaunted bipartisan fair funding formula enacted. But its potential to meaningfully affect change is largely ignored as it is only applied to new education funding, leaving 97% of education dollars untouched this year. Kind of hard to crow about repairing 3% of anything, really.

What do you do when the state executive and legislative branches can’t or won’t do the job? You turn to the courts, the judicial branch, to order them to meet their constitutional responsibility. The courts can determine whether parties are complying with the law and they can also determine the remedy, as they did in the watershed Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In 1999, some PA school districts sued in the Commonwealth Court to end decades of underfunding by the state legislature. The districts lost when the court ruled it lacked the necessary manageable academic and other standards to measure what kids needed to learn or even track how kids were doing.

Fast forward 16 years and we’ve experienced a sea change with our state awash in standards and assessments. It’s part of the reason why we know definitively that things are getting worse and that the Commonwealth is failing our poorest students most of all.

In March of 2015, the U.S. Department of Education singled out Pennsylvania as having the widest funding gap between rich and poor districts in the nation. Poor districts, like Philadelphia, receive up to 33% less per student than wealthy districts.

“The children who need the most seem to be getting less and less, and the children who need the least are getting more and more,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

On September 13, 2016, the ball bounces to the state Supreme Court, who will hear oral arguments in Philadelphia. The Supreme Court is the best chance to force the state to finally provide a “thorough and efficient system of public education.” This time, they have to tools to make a just ruling.

Join us at 10:30 AM at Philadelphia City Hall for the Fair Funding Lawsuit Rally. Raise your voice and be heard!

PA legislators have failed to fund our schools adequately–will the Court compel them to do the job we elected them to do? Join us Sept 13 as our kids finally have their day before the PA Supreme Court.    SIGN UP HERE

Do you believe in arts education? Since 2002, the Picasso Project has provided 34k students innovative arts projects at their schools. Find out how you can support bringing the arts to kids. And don’t forget to check out our exhibit at City Hall!

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