Schoolyard Fight: Corbett, Wolf spar over the governor’s history of education funding

For several months, commercials for Gov. Tom Corbett’s and Tom Wolf’s campaigns have made starkly different claims about the governor’s record on education spending.

“He’s increased spending in the education department — $1.5 billion from where it was when he took office,” says Corbett’s wife, Sue, in an April 2014 video.

“The facts speak for themselves. Tom Corbett cut a billion dollars from our schools,” counters the voiceover on a Wolf-for-governor ad from September 2014.

Each video provides its own sources for the claim. But if you ask teachers in Pittsburgh Public Schools whether Corbett cut funding to public education, they don’t need to look at charts or watch commercials to give you an answer.

“I’ve had this debate with people and if you would ask any teacher, they would undoubtedly say they’ve been cut,” says Nina Esposito-Visgitis, president of Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers. “We know what we’ve lost.

“The level of personnel in the schools has been drastically cut.”

Wolf and his supporters blame Corbett for the funding reduction. The governor’s campaign and supporters blame the federal government. But the undisputable fact in Pittsburgh is that the amount of funding the district receives from the state today is lower than it was before Corbett took office.

“I think part of the reason people are so angry now, is that was one of [Corbett’s] campaign promises, to make education better. In the city, I know you couldn’t find a teacher who says he has,” Esposito-Visgitis says. “It’s become less about education and less about quality and more about pinching every penny. The fact that education has become about the bottom dollar is maddening to me.

“It’s not about the kids.”

In the 2010-2011 fiscal year, Pittsburgh Public Schools received $207 million in state funding. The following year, when Corbett took office, Pittsburgh received $182 million. And the district’s allocation has never returned to pre-Corbett levels. In the most recent budget, for 2014-2015, the district received $184 million.

“The amount of money the school districts got from the state for what we call classroom programs was cut pretty significantly,” says Sharon Ward, executive director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. “While education [funding] did go up after the first year, in terms of funding in the classrooms it’s still lower then it was in 2010.”

For its part, the Corbett campaign says the governor’s decision to cut education was forced by a large budget deficit and the expiration of federal stimulus dollars for education.

“There were a lot of tough decisions to be made in 2011 when the governor took office,” says Billy Pittman, Corbett’s campaign press secretary. “We had a $4.6 billion budget deficit.”

In 2010-2011, Pittsburgh’s budget was supplemented with $18 million in federal stimulus money for basic education funding. Corbett’s first budget (2011-2012) did not use stimulus funds for education, but did increase the state’s contribution to basic education funding by $8 million. Still, that year, Pittsburgh only received $152 million for basic education funding — $10 million less than the year before.

“The first year that the governor was in office, he took action that resulted in very significant cuts to the basic education funding line and he made cuts to state-funded programs,” Ward says. “Those two areas were almost $900 million in reductions.”

Pittman counters that state funding for basic education was actually cut under former Gov. Ed Rendell.

“What happened is the state’s investment in our public schools was cut during the Rendell years. It was replaced by stimulus funding,” Pittman says. “[The stimulus] basically set the schools up for failure by using funding that was never going to return.”

However, that first year, Pittsburgh also lost $9.3 million for charter-school reimbursement (a category eliminated completely by Corbett), $3.3 million in block grants and $2.4 million in education assistance — roughly $15 million in state cuts unrelated to stimulus funds.

“The bottom line is, regardless where the money was coming from, there was $1 billion cut,” says Jeffrey Sheridan, Wolf’s press secretary. “[Corbett] used stimulus money in his first budget and he still cut education. That $1 billion that was cut came from the classroom.”

According to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, Corbett actually did use stimulus funds to supplement other segments of his budget, including the Department of Corrections. Only 50 percent of Corbett’s initial cuts to education in 2011 were due to the expiration of federal stimulus dollars, Ward says.

“The governor always said the [funding was from] ‘federal stimulus dollars, my hands were tied,’ but all of the federal stimulus money that was in the corrections budget was replaced by state funds,” Ward says. “That policy did not apply to public education. They just cut the funding and did not replace [it].”

While opponents have talked about Corbett’s $1 billion in education cuts, the governor has claimed that he actually raised education funding by $1.5 billion. According to Corbett’s campaign, his commitment of $10 billion for education is an all-time high in the state’s education funding.

“When moms and dads saw the hugely adverse impact on their kids and their property taxes, [Corbett’s] story was first, ‘I didn’t cut money, the federal government took money away,'” says Katie McGinty, a former Democratic candidate for governor and current head of Fresh Start Pa. — a political action committee set up by Wolf. “And then when that dog wasn’t hunting, his story became, ‘Well, actually we increased money.'”

But the Corbett campaign’s claim is supported by the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, a conservative think tank.

“The state did not cut back on its appropriations. State funding continued to increase each year after the federal funds went away,” says James Paul, a senior policy analyst for the foundation. “The recently passed Pennsylvania state budget sets an all-time record for state funding for public schools.”

By contrast, Ward, from the nonpartisan PBPC, says the increase in the state’s education funding is partly the result of increases to the state’s education pension contributions. And that message has been hammered home by Wolf and his surrogates, including McGinty.

“[Corbett has] changed the subject from how much money have you provided to kids in our classrooms to a discussion about how much money overall does the commonwealth pay to things that might be related to education,” McGinty says.

But to say that state pension spending doesn’t contribute to education is disingenuous, says Paul. Pennsylvania’s state and school district contributions to the pension fund have skyrocketed over the past five years, from under $1 billion in 2010 to more than $3 billion in 2014.

“There is a genuine pension crisis in Pennsylvania,” Paul says. “Some people will ignore pension costs and claim this doesn’t count as classroom spending. That’s not a persuasive argument to me.

“Should salaries for teachers not count for education spending? I think it should.”

According to the PBPC, the governor’s latest budget includes an estimated $1 billion in pension contributions. If the pension contributions are eliminated from the equation, education funding is at a lower level than it was in 2008-2009, when stimulus funds weren’t part of education spending.

“Over the course of the past several years the state added funding to that budget, but the vast majority went to the state’s pension budget, so they did not go into the classroom,” Ward says.

Jeremiah Dugan, an eighth-grade teacher at South Brook Middle School in the South Hills, says he sees the impact of Corbett’s cuts to education every day.

“Prior to Corbett, my average class size was probably 26 or 27 [students],” Dugan says. “In the years since his education cuts, the average has jumped up by 2 or 3 — and that doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but I have had more classes of 35 [students].

“I think any teacher will tell you the difference in trying to teach a class of 35 kids versus 27 is night and day. It definitely serves as a challenge.”

The cuts have also affected extracurricular programs; among the impacts were cuts to middle-school baseball and softball programs. The district has also had to lay off support staff, including teaching assistants.

“Several hundreds of paraprofessionals have been laid off in the past four years,” says Dugan. “And those men and women are invaluable in the classroom.”

Despite his disapproval of Corbett’s cuts, Dugan says the governor’s contribution to the state education pension fund is important. Still, he says, it shouldn’t detract from classroom spending.

“The governor would obviously like to see more of the funding go to the classroom,” says the Corbett campaign’s Pittman. “That’s why he’s been on the road talking about pension reform.

“The fact is, we have an obligation; the state for several years has avoided making payments to our pension costs.”

Dugan says the governor should have looked for alternatives to ensure funding for education across the board. One of his suggestions, also mentioned frequently by the Wolf campaign, is to levy an extraction tax on Marcellus Shale drilling.

But, says Pittman, “You’re talking about taking money away from those localities and directing it into Harrisburg’s coffers. There’s no guarantee of where it goes.” He adds, “You’ve got an industry that is creating growth across the commonwealth, investing dollars into local communities.”

But without an increase in revenue, Corbett’s opponents say education funding will continue to suffer where students need it most, in classroom spending.

“It’s not an either, or proposition,” Dugan says. “The decision isn’t do we fund this or that, it’s where do we get the revenue to invest in education.”

This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2014.