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Colorado's school-finance law is a lot like American foreign policy. Everyone says it's important, no one understands it, and it never accomplishes what it is supposed to.
Schools get most of their money from local property
taxes. If the district is rich, like Cherry Creek, there's
lots of local tax money for the school. If the school is in
Antonito, there isn't. So the state provides money to
equalize
spending.
The equalization formula is only slightly more difficult to understand than assembly-language computer programming, but the important thing to remember is that it doesn't equalize. Annual per-student spending ranges from $3,300 to $11,000 from the poorest district to the richest.
Our legislature has been aware of this inequity since 1973, the last time the law was revised, and has yet to act. So a consortium of do-gooder lawyers may hale the state into court in an attempt to improve Colorado education.
Maybe I'm uninformed (I was, after all, educated in this state), but I can't see how improved financing necessarily improves public education. And it remains to be proven that a better Colorado would result from improved public education.
A few weeks ago, I was reading a social history of the United States. It said that in 1840, before there was anything close to universal public education in this country, the adult illiteracy rate was 35 percent. When I returned the book to the library, a poster on the wall proclaimed that 38 percent of all adult Americans in 1984 were functionally illiterate.
I felt grateful to them and ashamed of myself. Never have I heard the illiterati complain about paying taxes to support something they never use -- libraries. And here I am, always complaining about having to pay for things I don't want and can't use -- water projects, economic development, nuclear warheads, the state senate . . .
American taxpayers spent $108 billion -- about $1.5 billion of that in Colorado -- on primary and secondary education last year.
For all that money -- enough to repel 5,400 phantom
Nicaraguan invasions of Honduras, or to build 10 new Denver
airports -- we do such a good job of teaching the masses to
read that we've had to convert our crosswalk signals from
WALK
and DON'T WALK
to illuminated
perambulator silhouettes and glowing crimson palms.
There is the argument that an expensive education is necessary for any sort of job in the dynamic high-tech future of Colorado.
Last December, more than 60 business, education and government leaders met for the annual Business-Economic Outlook Forum, sponsored by the University of Colorado and the Department of Local Affairs. They pooled their wisdom to predict which occupations would generate the most jobs in Colorado's foreseeable future.
Here's their list: waiter-waitress, sales clerk, cashier, sales representative, janitor, porter, accounting clerk, maid, typist, hand bookkeeper, nurse's aide, orderly, warehouse stock clerk, delivery route worker, secretary, general office clerk, food preparation helper, store manager, professional nurse, truck driver, secondary school teacher, blue-collar supervisor, accountant and auditor, sales floor stock clerk.
With perhaps half a dozen exceptions, an eighth-grade education at a fourth-rate school, somewhere where running water was a novelty and Genesis was the science text, would qualify a youngster for the exciting and fulfilling careers that Colorado will have the most of.
Providing more education than absolutely necessary might appear a civilized gesture, but our political and social structures would crumble if every Coloradan were truly educated.
Who would believe the state legislature when it decides that the deregulation of Colorado-Ute Electric Association is in the public interest?
What would keep our state lottery in business?
Where would Water for Colorado, A Citizens' Committee, Inc., find anyone to donate money to its noble crusade of raising everyone's taxes in order to benefit a very few?
Why bother going on? It's clear that there's no way to win by spending money on education, to equalize it or for any other purpose.
The results to date indicate that the bigger the budget, the more poorly-educated our populace. The growth areas of the future pay minimum wage and don't require much education. And if everyone were educated, society as we know it would collapse.
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