After 48 days in the courtroom, witness testimony in the Pennsylvania school funding trial concluded Tuesday, with petitioners presenting their rebuttal case. They called just one witness: Professor Matthew Kelly of Penn State University, who previously testified as an expert on Pennsylvania’s school finance system on Nov. 19 in petitioners’ case-in-chief.

For the final witness in their case defending Pennsylvania’s current school funding system, legislative leaders on Wednesday called an economist and longtime critic of school funding increases who has testified in 24 previous school funding lawsuits: Dr. Eric Hanushek. Hanushek is a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Attorneys for the state’s legislative leaders came close to wrapping up their case Wednesday as they called to the stand their ninth and tenth witnesses: a cyber charter official and an economist. The cyber charter official who testified was Brian Cote, who since 2019 has been the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment at 21st Century Cyber Charter School, which currently enrolls 1,600 students in grades 6-12 from across Pennsylvania.

Monday’s witness called by legislative respondents in the school funding trial, Max Eden, testified that Pennsylvania schools are well funded, that research is inconclusive as to whether additional financial resources boost academic achievement, and that additional school spending can be counterproductive.

Eden, who spent a full day on the stand, is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank.

The cross examination of Jason Willis, legislative respondents’ expert witness on Pennsylvania’s school funding system, dominated Friday’s court proceeding in the school funding case.

Willis, a researcher and program director at WestEd, a nonprofit education-focused research agency, gave detailed testimony Thursday based on the expert report he prepared in the case on behalf of legislative leaders.

On Thursday, court heard the conclusion of testimony from Dr. Maurice Flurie, the former CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school, who responded to cross examination about CCA’s low test scores and graduation rates and the millions of dollars of taxpayer funds the school spends on advertising each year.

On Tuesday, legislative leaders called to the stand Dr. Maurice Flurie, the former CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school.

Monday’s court session in the school funding trial ended early when attorneys for legislative leaders withdrew their witness, after a petitioners’ attorney pointed out numerous examples of apparent plagiarism in the witness’s expert report.

English learners and their performance on standardized tests were the focus of the school funding trial on Thursday afternoon and Friday as Republican legislative leaders called Christine Rossell, a professor emerita of political science at Boston University, as an expert witness.

The school funding trial shifted gears on Wednesday, as the legislative respondents in the case, Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman and House Speaker Brian Cutler, called their first witness.

In this trial about funding for public education, their first witness was Aaron Anderson, CEO and head of school at the Logos Academy, a small K-12 private Christian school with 225 students in York, Pa.

Court heard Wednesday from the leader of the final petitioner school district to testify in the school funding trial: Brian Costello, superintendent of the Wilkes-Barre Area School District.

On Tuesday, court heard a different perspective from Dr. Nancy Hacker, a retired educator who served as superintendent of the School District of Springfield Township from 2012 to 2020. Unlike most other districts in Pennsylvania, Springfield Township has the resources it needs to allow students to meet state standards, according to a state benchmark for adequate funding. Its current revenue, adjusted for student need, of $21,674 per student ranks 45th out of 499 school districts.

“I'll take every dollar we can get, and we can certainly put it to good use,” the finance chief for Philadelphia schools told the court on Monday, “but we were behind to begin with, and it hasn't caught us up.”

Uri Monson, chief financial officer of the School District of Philadelphia for the past six years, was referring to the state’s funding formula and its failure to resolve the “structural deficits” facing Philadelphia schools…

Commonwealth Court had an opportunity on Monday to hear from one of the many youth who are most directly impacted by Pennsylvania’s school funding problems. A recent high school graduate, 20-year-old P. Michael Horvath took the stand. Horvath was educated in the Wilkes-Barre Area School District, graduating in 2019, and he and his mother Tracey Hughes are Wilkes-Barre residents.

Professor Rucker Johnson, a leading researcher on the impact of changes in school funding on student achievement and life outcomes, has taken a systematic and comprehensive approach in his econometric studies. His conclusion is clear.

“School funding, school resource equity, is an essential investment to advance student achievement,” he said during his testimony on Thursday.

Economist Clive Belfield, testifying as an expert witness for the petitioners in the school funding trial on Wednesday and Thursday, said there is a large body of research demonstrating the economic and social benefits of educational attainment.

“The research shows a robust, large, significant positive relationship between education and adult outcomes – lifetime outcomes,” Belfield said.