HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania is woefully underfunding its schools if it hopes to meet state education standards, according to a state "costing-out" study released yesterday.

To enable students to reach 100 percent proficiency on reading and math, as well as master other academic standards, state and local governments would need to spend about $4.81 billion per year more on education than they do today, the study concluded.

"We're either going to make an informed decision on how to move forward on all children, or make an informed decision on which children we are going to leave behind," said James Barker, chairman of the special committee of the state Board of Education that supervised the study.

The state and school districts spent an average of about $9,512 per student during the 2005-06 school year, the most recent year for which the state has data. To meet state standards, they should have been spending an average of $12,057, according to the report.

Of the state's 501 school districts, 474 spent less than the report estimates is required to meet state standards.

Only seven school districts in Western Pennsylvania were adequately funding their schools as of 2005-06, under the report's calculations. Those districts are Allegheny Valley, Duquesne, Fox Chapel, North Allegheny, Pittsburgh, Quaker Valley and Wilkinsburg.

Noting the disparity in wealth among the Western Pennsylvania districts listed as spending adequately, Robert Feir of the state Board of Education speculated that districts with declining enrollment might have done well in the study because per-pupil spending didn't decline as fast as enrollment.

"We have no feel for what the districts could be and should be," said Justin Silverstein of Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, the Denver-based consulting firm that conducted the study. "We don't have a good answer on Pittsburgh versus Philadelphia. We just ran the numbers."

While the study determined Pittsburgh to be spending adequately, Philadelphia was deemed to fall more than $1 billion short.

The study determined per-pupil numbers for individual school districts by first coming up with a "base cost" of $8,003 per student, which represents the cost of achieving proficiency for a student with no special needs in a large school district with an average cost of living.

The study then added to the base cost amounts determined by how many students in a district were in poverty, English language learners, in special education or gifted. Other factors, such as the cost of living and the size of district, also resulted in changes to the cost.

Costing-out studies, which attempt to determine the minimum that a state must spend to reach its academic standards, have evolved since the Massachusetts Business Alliance conducted the first such study in 1991. Researchers have conducted more than 50 costing-out studies in 38 states, but this is the first in Pennsylvania, according to the Education Policy and Leadership Center.

The center, along with other groups, pushed the Legislature to fund the $648,000 study, and lawmakers appropriated money to do so in July 2006.

While some states have essentially ignored their costing-out studies, others have taken concrete action. Maryland, most notably, decided in 2002 to phase in a new school funding system over six years that would raise an additional $1.3 billion annually to comply with the recommendations of its costing-out studies.

The issue of Pennsylvania education funding is now back in the Legislature's hands, said Dr. Barker, who urged policy makers to look beyond just the aggregate dollar figure. "If we look at it as $4.8 billion, we are going to run -- we're going to grab the document and run," he said. "If we get down to what this really means, it's about an individual student having the opportunity to excel and meet the standards of Pennsylvania."