other line items that schools depend on to operate? Corbett maintains that the federal stimulus funding that Rendell used to bolster the education budget should not be considered when looking at budget changes. In addition, he makes his case by counting only the state contribution to one line item, “basic education.” In 2013, the state contribution to basic education was $5.53 billion — which is, indeed, $300 million higher than its 2008 peak under Rendell. But even accepting Corbett’s argument that federal stimulus dollars should be excluded, the state contribution to six key line items for education totaled $5.8 billion under Rendell in 2008, compared to $5.6 billion under Corbett in 2013. And though Corbett restored $172 million in annual basic-education dollars over the past two years, they are no longer allocated via a needs-based formula. What replaced it? The nontransparent distribution of supplemental funds to allegedly politically favored districts — and Philadelphia is not among the chosen. “There are only so many dollars you can get out of the taxpayer to pay for a system that is hemorrhaging money,” says Corbett’s campaign manager, Mike Barley. “What is the right number for education? I don’t think anybody knows that. And to that
“This budget sorts the must-haves from the nice-to-haves.” Rohrer, then a state rep from Berks County. Like other establishment Republicans, however, Corbett moved quickly to mollify the party’s mobilized right wing. The conservative movement was afire, and a rising Tea Party movement pledged to take over government — and radically shrink it. In February 2010, Corbett signed a pledge drafted by Washington anti-tax icon Grover Norquist to “oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes.” The election that November brought Corbett to power, and put both houses of the legislature under GOP control. The Republicans refused to raise taxes — indeed, they continued to cut them — and their 2011 budget cut more than $1 billion to schools and universities. “This budget sorts the must-haves from the niceto-haves,” Corbett told the legislature in March 2011, in unveiling his proposed spending plan. “I am here to say that education cannot be the only industry exempt from recession.” In the following months, the governor dismissed concerns over school-employee layoffs, telling school districts that they had only themselves to blame: “Many of them took federal money, were told the federal money would go away, made their budgets based on that, and now that money is not there,” he said. But by 2012, protests mounted, local budget gaps widened, and school districts planned property-tax hikes to stay afloat. The Corbett administration tried a strategy that was counterintuitive: They said there had been no cut to education at all. “Political opponents of the governor will cling to this myth of a $1 billion cut so long as the media goes along with the fiction,” spokesperson Kevin Harley complained to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that May. That’s what Corbett is sticking with, and upon which he is banking his re-election in 2014: convincing voters everything they know about education funding is wrong. “We spend more money on education than any time in the history of Pennsylvania,” Corbett said at his Northeast Philadelphia event earlier this month. How is that possible if the 2011 budget cut $421 million to basic education and another $444 million to five
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n October 2010, as Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell neared the end of his second and final term, he realized that his legacy was in trouble. “If the Republicans have both the governorship and both chambers of the legislature, then I think education funding is in real jeopardy,” he told the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. Rendell had made public schools his top priority, increasing annual state basic-education funding by a total of $992 million during his last four years in office. Much of that increase came in response to a “costing-out study” commissioned by the legislature, which determined that schools statewide were underfunded by $4.4 billion; in Philadelphia, the shortfall totaled $1 billion. Rendell pledged to begin closing the gap, and dispensed the new funds through a formula enacted in 2008 that awarded money based on student need. Rendell made his spending commitments in the midst of a recession, when tax revenues were dropping fast. He tapped $1.3 billion in one-time federal stimulus dollars to pay for two years of basic-education increases. Some of the stimulus dollars (including $355 million in 2009) also made up for reductions in the state contribution. The stimulus funds were intended to avoid tax hikes and spending cuts amid the recession. But Republicans protested the use of one-time federal dollars to pay for recurring costs. “I don’t see, from what we’ve seen so far, how you’re not going to leave the next governor with a disaster on their hands,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Jake Corman (R-Centre County) in March 2009. “We know they’re going to cut our [stimulus] funding in two years. We need to be prepared.” Rendell proposed ways to make up for the expiring federal dollars, including cracking down on the use of Delaware as a corporate tax haven and the imposition of a severance tax on natural-gas drillers. But a backlash was in the making. In his race for governor in 2010, Corbett, then state attorney general, was the clear favorite over Tea Party challenger Sam
NOISY PROTEST: When Gov. Corbett kicked off his re-election bid on Nov. 7 inside an American Legion Post in Northeast Philly, teachers and students protested loudly outside.
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