If there’s one thing state legislators can agree on, no matter their party affiliation, it’s that the way schools are funded in Colorado should change. But the failure of Amendment 73—which would have increased taxes to fund P-12 education—in the 2018 midterms was a reminder that solutions are hard to come by.
Education has been funded mostly the same way in Colorado since 1994, when the Public School Finance Act—which dictates how the state collects and distributes revenue for education—was adopted. Twenty-four years later, local lawmakers and policy experts say the problem with this system is twofold: First, there just isn’t enough money to go around (you’ll find sympathy for this idea more readily among Democrats than Republicans). Colorado spends about $7 billion per year on P-12 education, or about $7,662 per pupil per year, which is considerably less than the national average (approximately $12,526). Calculated by per-pupil funding by per-million dollars of income, the State Legislature’s Interim Committee on School Finance found Colorado’s rank ranges from 39th to 47th in the country.
