State Rep. Steven Malagari (D-Montgomery) speaks during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on the Pennsylvania Department of Education budget Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (House Democrats photo)
The loss of federal funding for Pennsylvania’s public schools would be “nothing short of catastrophic,” acting Education Secretary Carrie Rowe told state House lawmakers Monday.
President Donald Trump’s pledge to gut the U.S. Department of Education was front-of-mind among some members of the House Appropriations Committee in a day-long hearing on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s school spending request.
Rep. Steven Malagari (D-Montgomery) asked what the impact would be if Trump follows through on the threat, noting while 7.4% of the state Department of Education’s budget comes from federal sources, it’s an even larger share for some individual school districts.
“That funding helps our most vulnerable students and keeps a lot of our programs moving,” said Rowe, who Shapiro nominated last week to become his next education secretary.
The state receives about $1 billion under the sprawling federal programs that supplement local and state funding for disadvantaged students, teacher education and English language learners. It gets another $600 million under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which helps districts pay for individualized education plans for disabled and gifted students.
“If that were suddenly removed from schools’ budgets it would be catastrophic,” Rowe said, adding, at Malagari’s prompting, that it would likely result in local education tax increases.
Rep. Emily Kinkead (D-Allegheny) asked whether education officials are preparing to shore up the public education system if the federal education department is eliminated.
Rowe said what the Trump administration plans to do to the department remains unclear. Though Trump lacks authority to close the department, which would require congressional approval, he has expressed an intent to move education “back to the states.”
In her confirmation hearing earlier this month, U.S. Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon said the so-called Title programs would continue to be funded through Congress without reductions, but IDEA could become part of another agency.
Rowe said her department is taking stock of the Trump administration talking points and working to determine how many federally funded positions it has, how their loss would affect the department internally and what downstream effects could materialize in schools.
“We’re absolutely looking at that and trying to come up with as many possibilities as we can. But I’ll say that none of them are pretty,” Rowe said.
Lawmakers also asked Rowe for advice on what to tell constituents about how changes in federal funding could affect their children.
“You can start by telling parents the values of the Shapiro administration haven’t changed,” Rowe said, adding that nothing has changed in the law that requires schools to provide instruction and resources tailored to students with disabilities.
“Needless to say, if $600 million in IDEA funds failed to flow to the state, that would cause irreparable harm, and we certainly would need to have contingency plans in place to continue to meet the needs of students with disabilities in the state,” Rowe added.
At $19.8 billion, the Department of Education’s proposed budget is 4.8% larger than the current spending plan. That includes a $526 million increase to close a roughly $4.5 billion “adequacy gap” between the wealthiest and poorest districts identified after a state court declared Pennsylvania’s education funding system unconstitutional.
Republican lawmakers, generally, have supported education vouchers as another solution to helping students in failing schools. Shapiro campaigned in support of what were then called lifeline scholarships. But a deal with Senate Republicans to include $100 million for the program in Shapiro’s first budget fell through when House Democrats blocked it in 2023.
The subsequent spending plan included a modest increase for a pair of tax credit scholarship programs that allow companies and individuals to direct their tax liability toward private school education. One is exclusively for students in the bottom 5% of public schools.
But Rep. Charity Grimm Krupa (R-Fayette) was critical of Shapiro for not including a school choice proposal.
“I don’t see much in the way of new programs in this budget to advance those ideas,” Krupa said. “What does this budget do to get students out of schools that aren’t working for them and into schools where they can succeed?”
The hearing came days after Auditor General Timothy DeFoor released findings from an audit of five cyber charter schools, which showed they amassed excessive budget surpluses and engaged in “uncommon” spending for online schools. DeFoor said the schools’ aggregate fund balances increased 144% to $619 million between July 2020 and June 2023.
Asked for her “gut reaction” to the audit, Rowe told Rep. Aerion Abney (D-Allegheny) “to say that I was anything less than exceptionally concerned … would be an understatement.”
That’s due in part to surging enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic and because the state’s charter school law sets tuition based on what host districts spend per student, rather than the actual cost of delivering an exclusively online education. Shapiro’s budget includes a proposal to set cyber charter tuition at a statewide annual base of $8,000 per student. That would save school districts an estimated $378 million, Shapiro’s plan claims.
The report highlighted concerns education officials have been aware of and brought Shapiro’s proposals on how to reform cyber charter tuition into focus, Rowe said. She added while the cyber charters have a valid point that keeping budget reserves is prudent, their reserves as a percentage of their overall budgets are roughly four times those of school districts across the state.
“It seems to me that an $8,000 tuition wouldn’t harm the cyber schools … while at the same time it will provide some relief to school districts who need it the most,” Rowe said.