By State Sen. David Argall

The Basic Education Funding Commission wrapped up its work last week after 14 public hearings, 92 testifiers, and over 1,100 public comments. As the only northeastern Pennsylvanian on the commission, I was especially interested that hundreds of people from across the state asked us to either eliminate or significantly change our unfair and archaic school property tax system. To me, that is still the most important piece of the education funding puzzle.

The issues before the commission were what I referred to as “wicked problems” in my doctoral dissertation - problems with multiple conflicting definitions and no clear solutions.

Unfortunately, the commission was not able to come to a clear consensus - two separate reports received votes during the final public hearing on Thursday.

For many of the key issues, there was strong bipartisan consensus. The serious need to fix old schools and a desire for more predictability in how much state funding school districts receive, especially for schools with higher levels of poverty, were agreed to by all.

The split came because Democrats on the commission argued that an additional $7.5 billion is needed to properly fund our public education system. No one would disagree that for many schools, more funding is needed - but committing our state government to that astronomical total would soon result in massive tax increases, when school property taxes already are too heavy a burden to bear for too many people.

Simply dumping massive amounts of new tax dollars into our current system, with no guarantee that it will actually improve student performance, is reckless and irresponsible.

Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve one thing above all else - accountability. If we’re going to ask them to make even more significant investments in public education, they are entitled to know that our local students will truly benefit from their hard-earned dollars.

I expect the debates around these problems will continue, from the Senate Education Committee, which I chair, to the governor’s office. One thing is certain - doing nothing is not an option.

Sen. David Argall represents the 29th Senate District, covering all of Schuylkill and Carbon counties and parts of Luzerne County.