Parents Step Up As Advocates For Underfunded Schools

Pennsylvania’s Chronic Underfunding of Public Schools

Children being educated in closets. Students who had to wear coats in their classrooms during winter. Exposure to lead and asbestos. Crumbling infrastructure. One reading specialist per 1,000 children and one guidance counselor per hundreds of students. 

These were some of the testimonies given by students, parents, and school district personnel just a few years ago in the fair school funding case that determined the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s underfunding of K-12 education violated the state constitution. 

Under Article III, Section 14, the Commonwealth is mandated to ensure all students have a “meaningful opportunity to succeed academically, socially, and civically” by providing access to a “comprehensive, effective, and contemporary system of public education.” However, the case featured substantial evidence of inequitable funding disparities among school districts, particularly in low-wealth districts such as Philadelphia.

“The School District of Philadelphia is the most underfunded school district in the Commonwealth,” said Maura McInerney, Education Law Center’s lead litigator during the 2023 case. “If you also look at the cuts that happened post-recession, you will see that Philadelphia suffered the most. They cut more teachers. They cut more schools. The deprivation that they felt was exacerbated.”

There are nearly 200,000 students in the Philadelphia School District, with a significant proportion of economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, all of whom require additional resources. Yet, Philadelphia ranks 473 out of 499 school districts in the state regarding spending per weighted student, creating a deficit between what students are currently receiving and what they need. 

This deficit, called the “adequacy gap,” was determined through a modified state funding formula resulting from a ruling of the case that calculates the amount each school district must receive, compared to what it currently receives, for its students to achieve certain educational performance and meet state standards. The formula found that Philadelphia’s adequacy gap is $1.25 billion – a funding deficit of nearly $6,500 per student.

Philadelphia School District’s Funding Streams

The Philadelphia School District receives its funding from a mix of federal, state, and local sources. While the federal and state governments allocate funding to the districts, Philadelphia primarily funds its schools through various local tax streams, including property taxes. This creates a discrepancy between the amount that school districts receive, and low-wealth districts with high student populations, like Philadelphia, suffer the most because of this system. 

Using federal, state, and local funding, the district then uses its own formula to allocate those funds across the city’s schools, which is primarily based on student enrollment and school-specific needs. “The vast majority of [district funding] is pretty consistent, just based upon your student size, how many kids you have learning English, like that kind of thing,” said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, Senior Attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. “Whether I live in a gentrifying part of South Philadelphia, that’s like the same funding as the fanciest part of Center City and the poorest parts of the poorest areas within the city.”

It is also difficult to equitably fund schools because of the district’s already limited budget, which has repercussions for schools with low enrollment or that severely lack resources. “The population in different areas of the city is very different,” said Priyanka Reyes-Kaura, K-12 Education Policy Director at Children First. “You’ve got some schools, particularly in Northeastern Philadelphia, that are overcrowded with huge class sizes, and then you’ve got other pockets of the city that are more underpopulated and maybe don’t have enough resources, but it’s more so because there are so few students there. Thus, [the district] should be embedding principles of equity and ensuring that whatever changes are made benefit students of all different neighborhoods and types of backgrounds.” 

Funding the Adequacy Gap

Snapshot of Philadelphia School District’s adequacy gap and student need. (Credit: PA Schools Work/School District Fact Sheet, March 2025)

In July 2024, following the adequacy gap calculations across Pennsylvania school districts in response to the court’s decision in 2023, the Commonwealth allocated $500 million to its most underfunded school districts. In February 2025, Governor Josh Shapiro announced an additional $500 million in funding during his annual budget address. To date, the Philadelphia School District has received nearly $137 million in adequacy gap funding from the Commonwealth. However, this amount is only 11% of the total required to close the adequacy gap in Philadelphia.

Although the increased funding has benefited students by expanding after-school tutoring programs, offering resources to students facing homelessness, and hiring additional support staff such as guidance counselors and special education staff, the state needs to do more at a quicker pace to ensure no student gets left behind. 

“The state simply funded one-ninth of [the total deficit],” said Urevick-Ackelsberg. “The state has acknowledged that the districts are dramatically underfunded, but they’ve implied that there is a nine-year timeline, which is far too long, and haven’t even committed to that under the law.” McInerney added, “If we were to put the money in over 10 years, there is actually a generation of students who would not be recipients of that money.” 

Parents Respond as Advocates for More Funding

The 2023 court ruling was only the first step in winning the right to equitable funding in Philadelphia. The struggle for funding continues, but Urevick-Ackelsberg and McInerney noticed a similar theme regarding what they believe should entail the next steps.

“There is often a feeling that lawyers will solve the problem,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg. “If you want to enact broad change, you can’t just leave it up to the lawyers. The public needs to be engaged to force the General Assembly and the governor to do their job, to demand they fix this problem once and for all.” McInerney believes that the most compelling part that led to their success was the direct testimony offered by parents, teachers, and superintendents detailing their lived experiences with the school funding shortfall and how added funding benefited their children.  

This is one of the main strategies used by Lift Every Voice Philly, a non-profit organization focused on advancing racial, economic, and educational justice through parent-led advocacy. Based in West Philadelphia, their model involves member chapters in several district public schools that organize parents and caregivers as advocates on behalf of their children’s and the community’s needs. 

No field trips. No school nurses. These are some of the issues Lift Every Voice Philly has advocated for over the past four years, led by parents and caregivers who recognized certain needs in their community. One of their recent wins was the district’s agreement to adopt their wellness policy recommendations to create the first-ever mandatory recess policy in its history. 

Now, they are working on advocating for funding a Chief of Joy position, a need that revealed itself through a survey of 600 parents, a majority stating that their children hated going to school because of dehumanizing practices. Their findings align with the results of a recent district annual survey that found 36% of students indicated that they consistently feel like they belong at school, 45% feel welcome at school, and 31% enjoy being at school.

“For us, we want to center stories and always tie them back to the larger whole,” said Shanée Garner, Founding Executive Director of Lift Every Voice Philly. “If you ever see a Lift Every Voice member giving testimony, they’ll use their personal story or the stories of other members to talk about it as a system change.”

On April 4, 150 parents and supporters provided testimony at City Council using personal stories, which resulted in the passing of two resolutions that called for an examination of these dehumanizing practices and the need for the Chief of Joy position.

Children First, an education advocacy organization that serves the greater Philadelphia region, has also seen success in its grassroots organizing efforts, while including unlikely individuals in the conversation surrounding inequitable school funding. “I think that’s really the key to our success,” said Priyanka Reyes-Kaura. Their approach involves working closely with families and youth to harness their advocacy skills, while also working with sectors like the business community. “It’s because a lot of these policies that we work on matter for whole communities and families,” Reyes-Kaura added.

Parents Empowered for Change is a program administered by Children First. Rather than directly partnering with specific schools, they offer six- or nine-month paid fellowships for parents to learn how to effectively advocate for local and state educational policy change. To date, the program has trained parents to participate in advocacy efforts that have resulted in a one percent sales tax dedicated to public schools and increased funding to Pre-K and Head Start, among other wins.

Threats to Success

Philadelphia district parents, community members, and educators from Lift Every Voice Philly during a City Council meeting on their Chief of Joy position. (Carly Sitrin / Chalkbeat)

Parent testimony and advocacy efforts continue to influence educational funding legislation that directly benefits children and communities, especially when combined with legal efforts such as the 2023 school funding case. “I think the challenge is getting folks to see that parents are willing, more than able, have deep expertise, and the ability to cut through to issues that are absolutely urgent and will accelerate change,” said Shanée Garner.  

However, even with strong advocacy efforts, the question remains whether there will generally be enough funding to provide to Philadelphia public schools for these requests. In general, education is not cheap. “There’s no trick to cheaply administer education that educates children, because to educate kids, you need well-trained professionals,” said Urevick-Ackelsberg. “Those professionals need to be paid salaries. It’s going to take really serious efforts to increase funding to districts, to increase teacher pipelines, and to get more well-trained professionals into classrooms.”

Another challenge involves the current federal funding landscape for public education. Although the federal government funds the smallest portion of the Philadelphia School District’s budget, President Trump’s recent executive orders threaten the public education system in the U.S. and could have potentially deleterious effects on Title I funding, the federal program that provides supplemental funding to individual schools with a high percentage of low-income students. 

A large percentage of Philadelphia’s schools are eligible for Title I funding. Title I also helps to fund full-day kindergarten programs and around 1,400 teacher positions in the district.  

Then there is the potential reallocation of federal funds, including Title I, to the state. “Even if federal funds just move to the state for distribution, it could lead to possible delays or inefficiencies,” said Reyes-Kaura. “It would impose administrative costs on the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which is currently not set up for being able to distribute this large chunk of money.”

A Vision for the Future

Funding disparities for public schools are historically tied to racial inequality, an inequitable practice among many that were embedded into the U.S. public education system long before students stepped foot into the classroom. Because of the nature of the U.S. capitalist economy, the idea of an equal education opportunity cannot exist.

That is a key thesis of Dr. Jared Clemons’ research on education as a means to solving racial inequality. Dr. Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Temple University in Philadelphia.  

“We’ve come to think of the education system as the driver of the economy,” Dr. Clemons said. “I think there’s a reason to believe that at one point in time. But now, I think we should probably reconsider that.”

“I think part of what we need to do is ask ourselves, ‘What do we want of the education system? What do we want it to do?’”

The answer to that question lies in the hands of those who live through the impacts of the U.S. education system every day.