Education Law Center - PA

The Education Law Center's (ELC) mission is to ensure access to a quality public education for all children in Pennsylvania. Our principal strategies include direct representation, impact litigation, community engagement, policy advocacy at local, state, and federal levels, and strategic communications. Over the past 50 years, ELC has been a known resource for parents, child-serving professionals, and advocates in Pennsylvania to call for rights-based information and advice regarding public education matters. We are also a leader in public education advocacy, securing policy changes alongside local and statewide partners. With offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we work statewide to provide both immediate relief to individual students and advance systems-level reforms that benefit thousands of underserved students, focusing on our three priority areas: 1) Ensuring Equal Access to quality public schools: ELC addresses real-time educational barriers and systemic concerns impacting the educational experiences of underserved student populations. Our focus is improving education access for children living in poverty, children with disabilities, children of color, children in the foster care and juvenile justice systems, children experiencing homelessness, linguistically and culturally diverse students and their families, LGBTQ+ gender expansive youth, and children at the intersection of multiple underserved identities, ages 0-21. Our Helpline is the only free legal service solely focused on helping students access a quality public education in Pennsylvania, providing information, advice, referrals, legal consultation, and direct representation. We also produce publications and conduct trainings to help parents, students, caregivers, and child-serving professionals. 2) Advocating for Fair Education Funding: ELC works with statewide and local partners to push for the changes needed to address Pennsylvania's school funding crisis. We filed a lawsuit against the Commonwealth over a decade ago for failure to fund public education under the state constitution. In 2023, we won this case in a decisive victory in Commonwealth Court, in an order and opinion finding education is a fundamental right and deeming the state's current funding system unconstitutional and discriminatory. Now, we are focusing on a remedy. Our litigation is complemented by policy advocacy, including budget advocacy through the PA Schools Work coalition, as well as educating policymakers on the state's education funding system, our lawsuit, and needed funding increases to make sure the state is adequately and equitably funding public education. 3) Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: ELC aims to end school pushout by eliminating exclusionary discipline policies that disproportionately harm Black and Brown youth, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ youth, with a focus on advancing the rights of Black girls. In addition to confronting discriminatory policies, we advocate for schools to adopt research-based interventions that will improve school climates and build inclusive and affirming schools. In 2024, we saw monumental wins for students across Pennsylvania as a result of ELC's legal and policy advocacy, including : - Secured a $1.1 billion state funding increase for public schools in response to the landmark decision in our Commonwealth Court case mandating school funding reform. The state budget includes a new "adequacy funding" stream exclusively for school districts that are underfunded relative to their students' needs. - Reached a settlement agreement with state officials in our lawsuit on behalf of former students from Glen Mills Schools, committing the Pennsylvania Department of Education to increased oversight of educational programs in residential facilities and establishing a complaint system. A prior agreement in this case provided compensatory education and damages to over 500 former students. - Worked with the School District of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Public Schools to revise their districtwide dress codes, which now emphasize students' "right to dress in a manner that celebrates their racial, cultural, religious, and gender identities," affirming the right to wear protective hairstyles. - Supported parent advocacy in 24 school districts, countering harmful, extremist school board policies that exclude transgender students and create hostile school environments for Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ students. - Remedied special education deficiencies through state complaints that led to new policies expanding access to education for youth in detention centers in Philadelphia and Allegheny County. - Assisted, through ELC's Helpline, more than a thousand students who are most marginalized by our education system.