Hold “Harmless”: A Quarter Century of Inequity at the Heart of Pennsylvania’s Public School System

Pennsylvania’s school districts have undergone massive enrollment shifts over the past three decades. The state funding distribution, though, has largely remained the same, treating districts as though their student counts haven’t changed. This has helped create an education funding system that’s among the most inequitable in the nation.

In this report, PCCY details how the state’s “hold harmless” funding approach is to blame. Implemented in 1992, hold harmless is the policy that school districts cannot receive less funding than they did the year prior. For the next quarter century, the state gave each district small annual increases with little regard for changing enrollment levels. Though the state implemented a funding formula in 2016, it applies only to new funding. That means 89% of state Basic Education Funding is still distributed through the hold harmless-based method.