With high expectations and more than a mixed amount of trepidation, the long-awaited Costing-Out Study on the state of Commonwealth spending on public education was released last week. As Dan U-A has already posted, it quantifies why our state ranks at the bottom of the nation and maintains one of the country’s most inadequate and inequitable funding systems for its most valuable resource – our, yours and mine, children.

The study, commissioned by a bi-partisan committee of state legislators last spring and conducted for more than a half million dollars by a national firm which has done similar studies across the nation, determined that the average cost of educating a child in the state came to around $12,000. According to the study, the state underfunds public education by $4.8 billion. About 95 percent of the school districts – 474 out of 501 – are underfunded, Philadelphia by as much as 50 percent. What has often been billed as a Philadelphia complaint has now been proven to be a massive system of inequity and poverty that touches all but the wealthiest of districts in the Commonwealth.

The billion dollar question of course is not what the study says but what are we and our legislators going to do about it. This study can and should shake things up but it can also sit on a shelf along with plenty of other proof that injustice exists.

Hoping to emulate the many impressive YPP interviews before, I talked with Justin DiBerardinis, a proud Central H.S. graduate, who has spent the past two years criss-crossing the eastern region as an organizer for Good Schools Pennsylvania about what the study means and where we need to go with it.