Barry Goldwater, in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention, declared, “It is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, public or private, (and) to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people.”
Oh, where have you gone, Sen. Goldwater, and the party you once led? Not to Colorado.
Some Colorado Republicans are today championing a proposal to take power from local communities and concentrate it in the hands of state officials. As Rep. Joe Stengel suggests, they seek to impose a one-size-fits-all spending mandate on every school in the state, regardless of the schools’ unique needs or the wishes of local voters. And they seek to empower state bureaucrats both to enforce this mandate and to parcel what little discretion might remain to vary the state mandate in order to meet local needs.
The mandate would require that every district spend at least 65 percent of its budget on classroom expenses. Those classroom expenses do not include people hired to protect and discipline students, transportation, counselors, principals, food service, after-school programs, teacher education, analysis of CSAP data to improve instruction, aligning curriculum with state standards, costs to comply with federal mandates, and more.
The assumption that props up the 65 percent mandate springs from nostalgia for a time long gone, the classroom of the 1950s. There were then no federal mandates. Troublesome students could be summarily expelled, often permanently. And no one imagined that schools should prepare every student, regardless of background, for college. In short, schools in the 1950s had little reason to spend money outside the classroom.
Not so today. Federal special-education laws, to choose only one modern mandate, are hundreds of pages long and require schools to hire many professionals explicitly disallowed by the 65 percent mandate, such as nurses, psychologists, counselors and administrators. When and how schools can discipline students is now heavily regulated by state and federal law, and there are lawyers at every turn. And schools, quite properly, must now seek to prepare every student for post-secondary education.
Moreover, the 65 percent mandate ignores the unique interests and needs of our schools. The Cortez School District is 50 miles from end to end and spends roughly $800,000 a year to transport students, 10 percent of that just to travel to and from student activities that are often hundreds of miles away, all costs disallowed by the 65 percent mandate.
Mapleton, a district in the Denver area that is nearly twice as large with a budget to match, spends roughly the same amount as Cortez on transportation. But Mapleton, responding to its community, has embarked on an extensive effort to reshape its school district into smaller schools and magnet schools to better address the needs of a student body that is predominantly from Hispanic and lower socio-economic households. The extra staff to plan and to implement these changes also would be disallowed.
We could tell the same story for every school district in the state. Denver Public Schools has invested heavily in literacy coaches and teacher education, steps that the research overwhelming supports as necessary if the district wishes to improve student achievement. Staff for both are disallowed by the 65 percent mandate. Tiny Hinsdale in Lake County five years ago passed its first bond issue in decades so that it could reopen its high school rather than bus students 60 miles to Gunnison. This is a community choice the 65 percent mandate would take away.
All of this effort to extend the state’s authority over our schools comes at the behest of a dot-com millionaire and a paid political consultant who are pushing the 65 percent mandate in Colorado and three other states. As they freely admit, the targeted states all have easy access to the ballot and a high-stakes governor’s race in 2006. They are not much concerned about the interests of Denver or Hinsdale.
The 65 percent mandate supported by big out-of-state money assumes Big Brother knows best. This is not our fathers’ Republicanism. Sen. Goldwater, where have you gone?
Kenneth A. DeLay is the executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards.
