When it comes to state fiscal policy, actions speak louder than words. In Colorado, officials talked about saving the children with Amendment 66. Their actions suggest the real goal was to scare you into voting to give them even more money to spend.
During the Amendment 66 campaign Governor Hickenlooper and other officials implied that without $1 billion from Amendment 66 Colorado’s K-12 education system would remain woefully underfunded, condemning the state’s children to substandard educations. If that were the case, and if those people really cared about educating the children, then one would have expected to see them make every effort to direct any additional state revenue into new K-12 education funding in this year’s state budget.
Instead, Governor Hickenlooper’s new budget now proposes a $100 million boost to higher education.
No doubt the funding will be essential to funding such courses as “Teaching Social Justice” in which “students investigate progressive pedagogical and community organizing strategies to encourage higher levels of creativity and analysis among their peers” and “Renewing Democracy in Communities & Schools,” a course designed to meet the Human Diversity Core requirement and position students to receive a $1,175 AmeriCorps Education Award “in exchange for their participation in two semesters of the course.”
Whatever happened to funding repairs on the state’s roads and bridges?
Linda Gorman is director of the Health Care Policy Center at the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
