In 2009, the School District of Philadelphia spent about 59% of what it would cost to get its kids to national average outcomes. In 2024, it spent about 55%. Fifteen years, two governors’ worth of “fair funding” talk, one landmark court ruling, and the city sits right about where it started: roughly half of adequate.
Meanwhile, just across City Avenue, Lower Merion spent 333% of adequate in 2009 and 226% in 2024. It’s down, sure. It’s still more than four times Philadelphia’s position on the same yardstick.
I’ve been writing about Philadelphia on this blog for well over a decade. It keeps showing up because it keeps being the clearest case of a pattern I see across states: a state school finance system that provides systematically less to the districts that need the most, and then blames those districts for the results. This is the Philadelphia Story, updated through 2024, and through the state’s response to having its system ruled unconstitutional.
Philadelphia, “screwed,” and the myth of the money pit
Philadelphia has been a fixture on my lists of the nation’s most financially disadvantaged (“screwed”) city school districts for as long as I’ve been making them. Those lists measure state and local revenue per pupil relative to other districts in the same labor market, alongside child poverty relative to that same market. Philadelphia always lands there in good company: Reading and Allentown, often at or near the very top of the mid-size city list. When Next City covered the list in 2013, Pennsylvania had 11 districts on it, more than any other state, and Philadelphia was handing out 3,783 layoff notices to close a $300 million hole.
“They’ve thrown millions at Philly and gotten nothing”
Then there’s the storyline that won’t die. Philadelphia, we’re told, is the cautionary tale: a district that has been handed millions upon millions, with nothing to show for it. Proof that money doesn’t matter. Time to close schools, charter everything, and move on.
I took this on in 2013 in Debunking Reformy “Messaging”: A Philadelphia Story, after claims circulated that Philadelphia received among the most state aid in Pennsylvania. Of course it does, in total. It’s the largest district in the state. Big aggregate numbers (state aid totals, a multi-billion-dollar operating budget) say nothing about whether the dollars per child are sufficient for the children actually enrolled. Per pupil, relative to need and relative to its neighbors, Philadelphia has been short for as long as anyone has been measuring.
The “handed millions, got nothing” argument requires a period in which Philadelphia was actually handed enough. The graphics below show there was no such period. Not in 2009. Not in 2013. Not in 2021. Not in 2024. You can’t conclude money didn’t work when the money never showed up. As I put it back then, “real reform must begin with resources!”
What adequacy actually costs, and which bar we’re setting
In 2014, Jesse Levin and I wrote Educational Equity, Adequacy, and Equal Opportunity in the Commonwealth for the William Penn Foundation. The headline was not subtle. Pennsylvania ran one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation. Funding was regressive, with higher-poverty districts receiving less state and local revenue per pupil than lower-poverty ones. Against the state’s own 2008 costing-out targets, shortfalls approached $4,000 per pupil in the highest-poverty quintile, versus about $1,200 in the lowest. Districts with smaller funding gaps, all else equal, posted higher PSSA and SAT results.
The national education cost model (NECM) in the School Finance Indicators Database extends that logic nationally. It estimates, for every district, what it would cost to reach a given outcome target, accounting for poverty, labor costs, scale, and population density. In The Real Shame of the Nation, we found Philadelphia, Reading, and Allentown spending roughly half of what it would take to reach national average outcomes, and performing about where the model would predict for that spending. Lower Merion, next door, spent nearly four times its estimated need.
The formula that almost was
Pennsylvania did once try to fix this. A 2007 state costing-out study found that 474 of 501 districts spent less than an adequate amount, and that closing the gap would take about $4.4 billion more a year, roughly $1 billion of it in Philadelphia alone. In 2008, Governor Ed Rendell pushed through a new need-based formula built on that study, with the goal of raising the state’s share by $2.6 billion a year by 2014. It would have helped. The first year brought a $275 million increase in basic education funding.
Then the Great Recession hit. In 2009-10 and 2010-11, the state cut its own contribution and backfilled with $654 million a year in federal stimulus money, so the formula’s “increases” were largely federal dollars. When the stimulus ran out, the 2011-12 budget under Governor Tom Corbett cut education aid deeply and the formula was abandoned. Philadelphia’s slide in the graphics below, from 59% of adequate in 2009 to the mid-40s, is what that collapse looks like on the ground.
Two bars: national average and Massachusetts average
The graphics below use the national average outcome as the target. That’s worth dwelling on, because it’s a low bar. It doesn’t ask Philadelphia’s kids to be exceptional. It asks only that they score like the typical American child. Philadelphia hasn’t been funded to clear even that.
Now raise the bar to the Massachusetts average, the outcome level of the nation’s consistently top-performing state, and a reasonable stand-in for what a well-funded, high-expectation system can deliver. The cost of reaching a higher target rises, and it rises fastest for districts serving the highest concentrations of poverty. So every gap in this post gets bigger, and Philadelphia’s gets bigger the most.
I raise both because Pennsylvania’s policy debate tends to treat “adequate” as a generous aspiration. It’s not. At the national-average standard, it’s the floor. At the Massachusetts standard, it’s what a state that takes its constitutional obligation seriously would actually be aiming for.
Fifteen years in two pictures
The first graphic maps each district in the Philadelphia metro by its percent of adequate funding: actual per-pupil spending divided by the estimated cost of national-average outcomes. Blue is above 100%. Red is below.
The story in the spotlight panel:
| District | 2009 | 2013 | 2021 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Philadelphia City | 59% | 53% | 45% | 55% |
| William Penn | 77% | 58% | 49% | 55% |
| Upper Darby | 91% | 69% | 59% | 56% |
| Norristown | 105% | 97% | 72% | 82% |
| Radnor Twp | 261% | 218% | 231% | 223% |
| Lower Merion | 333% | 292% | 251% | 226% |
Two things jump out. First, Philadelphia never gets close. It starts at 59%, bottoms out in the mid-40s, and ends no better than it began. Second, the red is spreading. In 2009, 5 of 62 metro districts were below adequate. By 2024, 15 were. The inner-ring Delaware County districts (Upper Darby, William Penn) slid from near-adequate to Philadelphia’s level, and Norristown dropped below the line. Even as the metro average fell from 187% to 138% of adequate, the wealthiest suburbs stayed comfortably above 200%.
The second graphic plots all of Pennsylvania’s roughly 500 districts: percent of adequate funding on the horizontal axis, outcomes relative to the national average on the vertical, bubbles sized by enrollment.
The relationship is about as clear as these things get. Districts left of the 100% line sit almost uniformly below the national average. Philadelphia, Reading, and Allentown huddle together in the lower-left corner in every year, roughly 0.4 to 0.7 standard deviations below the national mean. Lower Merion sits in the upper right, around 0.8 above. These districts are not underperforming relative to their resources. They are performing about where their resources predict.
One caution on 2024. Philadelphia’s uptick from 45% to 55% likely reflects, at least in part, temporary federal pandemic relief, which has since expired. And these data end before the first post-ruling state adequacy supplement arrived in 2024-25. Which brings us to the court.
The court ruled. Then what?
In February 2023, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer ruled in William Penn School District v. Pennsylvania Department of Education that the state’s school funding system was unconstitutional. The roughly 800-page opinion found the system failed students in low-wealth districts and left the remedy to the legislature. Note who the lead plaintiff is. William Penn, in Delaware County, sat at 77% of adequate in 2009 and 55% in 2024.
The legislature’s Basic Education Funding Commission came back in January 2024. Its majority report found 387 of the state’s 500 districts below their adequacy targets and called for $5.4 billion in new money phased in over seven years, plus annual increases for cost growth.
Here’s what has happened since:
| Budget year | New adequacy and tax-equity supplement | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-25 | About $526 million | $494 million adequacy plus $32 million tax equity. Philadelphia’s share: $136.6 million, against an adequacy gap of $1.25 billion (Philadelphia Tribune) |
| 2025-26 | $565 million | Passed after a 4-plus-month impasse; Philadelphia’s board authorized borrowing up to $1.55 billion to cover missing state payments (WHYY) |
| 2026-27 | $565 million | Signed July 12, 2026 (City & State PA) |
That’s about $1.66 billion over three years. Even the commission’s own seven-year path implies about $770 million a year. The state is behind a schedule that was already a compromise, and it has now flat-lined the increment at $565 million, two years running, while costs keep rising. State Sen. Vincent Hughes now says this adequacy money means “70 percent of Pennsylvania schools are funded constitutionally.” That framing tells you which 30% are still waiting. Philadelphia, Reading, Allentown, and William Penn are not hard to guess.
And the adequacy targets themselves are modest. The commission benchmarked “adequate” to the spending of districts already meeting state performance thresholds, a successful-schools-style method that Jesse Levin and I flagged back in 2014 as a weak basis for costing out what high-need districts require. Measured against the national-average bar, never mind Massachusetts, the destination is short of where the cost model says it needs to be.
In between Rendell’s formula and the 2023 ruling, nothing was done that actually fixed the problem. Formulas were renamed and tweaked at the margins, but the distribution of state aid never moved much toward need, and the overall level never caught up to what the state’s own cost study said was required.
So: not no money. But little progress where it counts. Three rounds of supplements after a constitutional ruling, and Philadelphia’s own formula gap remains above $1 billion. Measured against national-average outcomes, the city has spent the entire period somewhere between 45% and 60% of adequate.
What it would take
The Philadelphia Story isn’t complicated. It’s just long. A state that relies heavily on local property wealth, a big city with high need and limited capacity, and a ring of suburbs spending two or three times what they need. Cut aid when times are tight, as in 2011. Pass a formula, then let it die. Lose in court, then fund the remedy at a pace that leaves the neediest districts waiting longest.
Getting Philadelphia to adequate means:
- Close the gap on a real schedule. Fund the remaining adequacy gap in full within the commission’s seven years. Don’t flat-fund the increment.
- Pick a meaningful target. National-average outcomes should be the floor, not the goal. Cost out what it would take to reach Massachusetts-level outcomes and be honest about the difference.
- Run all the money through the formula. Make sure state aid actually follows need, and keep the formula funded through the next downturn.
- Keep score. Track spending against cost-model estimates year by year, district by district, the way the graphics above do.
And the next time someone tells you Philadelphia proves money doesn’t matter, ask them a simple question: in which year was Philadelphia ever funded adequately? I’ve got fifteen years of data here. I can’t find one.
Sources
- School Finance Indicators Database, NECM/SEDA merged file (data behind both graphics)
- Baker, B. D., & Levin, J. (2014). Educational Equity, Adequacy, and Equal Opportunity in the Commonwealth. William Penn Foundation / AIR.
- Baker, B. D., Weber, M., Srikanth, A., Kim, R., & Atzbi, M. The Real Shame of the Nation. Albert Shanker Institute.
- Debunking Reformy “Messaging”: A Philadelphia Story (2013), schoolfinance101
- Why the Philly School District, One of the Nation’s “Most Screwed,” Is Laying Off Thousands, Next City, 2013
- How state funding has changed since the costing-out study, Philadelphia Public School Notebook, September 2010
- Spotlight PA on the Basic Education Funding Commission report, January 2024
- Gaps persist in Pennsylvania after school funding reform, Philadelphia Tribune, January 2026
- WHYY on the 2025-26 budget
- 10 things to know about Pennsylvania’s 2026-27 state budget, City & State PA
- Senator Hughes on the FY26-27 adequacy round
