If you want to understand the stunning implications of Judge Sheila Rappaport’s ruling on Colorado school finance, first wrap your mind around a simple comparison.
One month ago, state voters rejected by nearly two to one a tax package that would have raised $3 billion for education over five years. Yet in her ruling last week declaring school funding in this state “unconscionable” and “unconstitutional,” Rappaport spoke approvingly of a possible infusion of an additional $1.94 billion to $4.15 billion a year.
To be sure, the judge did not order the state to come up with any such sum, but she cited the figures as legitimate estimates of what might be required to create a “thorough and uniform system” of public schools, as mandated by the state constitution.
In other words, Colorado could need a tax hike nearly seven times as large as the one voters just trounced to satisfy this momentous and misguided ruling. And that assumes no other part of the state budget grows — not even Medicaid, whose expansion shows no sign of slowing.
If Rappaport’s decision is upheld by the state high court, it will ensure, among other things, that higher education never gets a single dime in additional funding. How could it, with K-12 education so far in arrears?
The judge didn’t simply side with the plaintiffs; she adopted their position wholesale, without a shred of skepticism regarding any of their claims on topics ranging from teacher quality to preschool to the achievement gap, or any of their expert witnesses.
Indeed, she apparently cut and pasted substantial swaths of the plaintiffs’ proposed “findings of fact and conclusions of law” into her own opinion.
So much for thinking for yourself.
Rappaport suggests that the creation of a standards-based education system over the past 18 years, with state tests and achievement targets and the overlay of the federal No Child Left Behind law, obligates the state to reach 100 percent student proficiency. This is an utterly unrealistic mandate no matter how large the budget, and perhaps the judge isn’t actually endorsing it. But if so, what level of achievement would demonstrate compliance, as she sees it, with the state constitution?
She never offers an explicit answer, preferring instead to quote bold-sounding but imprecise goals endorsed over the years by the legislature, such as “each student who receives a public education in Colorado is prepared to compete academically and economically within the state or anywhere in the nation or the world” and “all students will be postsecondary and workforce ready.”
But whatever such boilerplate aspirations mean to the judge — how many high-school graduates are truly prepared to compete “anywhere” in the world? — she is clear enough that we won’t achieve them without a staggering infusion of cash.
If nothing else, Rappaport’s one-sided blast brings sobering clarity to the stakes in this case. Even lawmakers who would like a significant boost in school funding aren’t talking about a fix. That’s in part because they’re waiting for an appeal but also because no fix is possible under her terms. They’d have to defund the rest of government to comply, or ask voters for sums vastly greater than they’ve already turned down.
Who knows? Maybe even the two remaining high court justices indirectly responsible for Rappaport’s ruling, because they helped reverse lower-court decisions that would have killed this case in the cradle, will have second thoughts. Not that repentance is strictly necessary, however, since the high court has two new members (one of whom will have to recuse herself). Does a majority on the present court also advocate judges assuming the role of education czars?
With this case poised for an appeal, at the very least we need to find out.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
