Pennsylvania Spends More on Special Ed While Proven Reading Methods Stay Underfunded

What Pennsylvania’s budget actually includes

Governor Shapiro signed the $50.8 billion 2026-27 budget with bipartisan support after months of negotiation in the state’s divided legislature. The plan directs $58 million more to basic education and $55 million more to special education, raising total special ed appropriations to $1,581,815,000. An additional $565 million flows toward historically underfunded school districts as part of the state’s response to a 2023 constitutional equity ruling, which identified a $4.5 billion adequacy gap. With this year’s allocation, Pennsylvania has directed $1.9 billion toward closing that gap.

Spotlight PA, covering the budget’s passage, noted it sends more money to the poorest schools and “skips difficult policy questions.” That framing is worth holding onto.

The question the spending numbers don’t answer

In 2025, Pennsylvania passed Act 47 — a law requiring evidence-based reading curricula grounded in the Science of Reading for grades K-3, universal literacy screening three times per year, and mandatory structured literacy teacher training. The mandate takes full effect in 2027-28. It is the kind of law reading scientists have called for since the research was settled decades ago: the corrective for a guessing-based approach to reading instruction that, as cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg documented, taught struggling readers to look like they were reading instead of actually reading.

This budget funded Act 47 implementation at $10 million. Advocates with the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition asked for $50 million. Four Pennsylvania school districts, highlighted in the Coalition’s May 2026 Proof Points report, are already demonstrating that strong reading growth is achievable in high-poverty settings when the right instruction is in place. The Coalition’s case is direct: find out what those four districts are doing and fund every district to do the same.

The spending-outcomes gap in Pennsylvania is not a mystery. Education spending grew 68 percent over a decade; fewer than 4 in 10 elementary students now read at grade level, down from 6 in 10 in 2015. The pattern is familiar. Researchers documented the failure of guessing-based reading instruction long before Emily Hanford’s 2019 investigation made it a national story. States started passing corrective laws. Pennsylvania is one of them. The science was never the problem. The system that funds its implementation is. Learn more about the multi-system picture of reading difficulty that the instruction debate often misses.

What parents of children who learn differently should do now

The $55 million increase is real money that funds real services. The right question for parents is not whether the money exists, but whether it reaches effective instruction. Act 47’s structured literacy requirements kick in by 2027-28 for most districts, but that deadline is closer than it sounds, and $10 million in implementation funding is already moving. Parents do not need to wait for the mandate deadline to ask whether their child’s school is already moving toward structured literacy practice.

The PA Literacy Coalition’s Proof Points report names the four districts leading the way. Ask your principal what they know about those examples and whether your district is on the same path. Ask how the special education increase is deployed in your building: whether it funds reading specialists, evaluations, or services your child actually uses. Spending approved at the state level helps most when it turns into a specific person or program in your child’s classroom.

A diagnosis or a label tells you where your child is today. The research on neuroplasticity is clear that it does not predict where they will be after a year of the right kind of practice. The brain rewires with the right approach, and finding out exactly which systems need support is the step the spending debate skips entirely.