Education spending is always a controversial topic. Most everyone agrees that we should have top notch schools with great teachers helping our kids become well educated leaders of tomorrow. However, almost no one agrees on how we should do that and how much we should have to pay to make that happen.
This week’s decision from the Colorado Supreme Court may make this problem even more difficult to solve. By a 4-3 vote, the State Supreme Court overturned two lower court decisions allowing a case to go forward that have severe ramifications on the state budget.
A group of parents from a total of 22 school districts, 14 of them from the San Luis Valley, can now go to Denver District Court and try to prove that the state government does not uphold its own constitution by providing a “thorough and uniform” education for every eligible child in the state.
The judgment from this pending case may find that the state doesn’t spend enough money on education and mandate more money be spent on K-12 education. That’s right, even though it already takes a major portion of the state budget and is constitutionally protected to increase every year, it is possible that Colorado doesn’t spend enough on education.
I realize that almost every public policy problem comes down to money, but with this one, that’s not the most confusing part of the problem. I think it’s harder to look beyond the money and ask exactly how we would define “thorough and uniform”.
In a state as diverse as Colorado, how do you make education more “uniform”? And I am dying to find out how we go about defining “thorough”.
In fact, in the dissent opinion, State Supreme Court Justice Nancy Rice said, "There is no national standard from which this court could adopt a definition of 'thorough,' and more importantly, the varying definitions other states ascribe to the term illustrate no consensus on what 'thorough' means."
To me, “thorough and uniform” sound like good idea words written by people who write constitutions. They roll off the tongue, like “domestic tranquility” and a “more perfect union”. I know that’s an entirely different document, but you know what I mean.
We can pretend that money will solve the issue, but I don’t think it will solve this one. We’re trying to turn rosy words into policy and trying to define those rosy words are going to get us in trouble.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel the kids in Meeker should get a worse education than the kids in Highlands Ranch, but my point is, whether we like it or not, their educations will be different and they will not be uniform. I don’t know how you make the education a student receives at a high school with 30 students uniform with a high school with 3500 students.
So while this case may end up revolving around funding, when our elected representatives try to define what the writers of our constitution meant, it’s going to get messy. And the only thing that will clean up that mess will be a time machine to visit aforementioned constitution authors, and I don’t think one of those is in the budget.
