According to the sponsors of Senate Bill 135, Colorado teachers will remain severely underpaid unless voters approve massive spending increases and a permanent change to how the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) revenue cap is calculated.
In reality, even if it were true that Colorado’s teachers are underpaid, the SB-135 tax hike does not guarantee that things like teacher pay will increase or that teacher retention will improve.
Let’s examine why.
False Advertising
The stated purpose of SB-135 is to direct new education funding to any of four categories, as best determined by school districts: increasing teacher pay, improving teacher retention, lowering class sizes, and increasing access to career and technical courses.
However, as bill sponsor Senator Jeff Bridges clarified during Senate floor debate, SB-135’s education funding must be used for at least one of those purposes, but not necessarily for all categories.
In other words, while possible, there’s absolutely no guarantee the money would actually increase teacher pay, despite being one of the bill’s key marketing points.
As has been empirically established, as government more heavily subsidizes tax-financed systems, administration bloat follows.
For example, K-12 education, healthcare, and higher education have experienced meteoric increases in administrative spending and, unsurprisingly, together now account for over two-thirds of the Colorado state budget.
One could easily imagine how a district might claim that adding administrators improves teacher retention by providing more support and reducing teachers’ stress.
Or maybe a new stadium could be argued to increase teacher retention, because teachers love their school’s sports so much that it improves their job satisfaction.
Like back pain, these things are easy to claim, but difficult to prove, which highlights how ineffective SB-135 may prove in doing what it advertises, since it cannot guarantee that any of the spending will actually work as advertised.
Money tends to follow the path of least resistance, which could mean entirely different priorities are funded than intended by bill sponsors.
Declining Enrollment
Ultimately, legislators cannot divorce teacher pay, retention, and related issues from economic forces, no matter how hard they try.
Class sizes in Colorado are already decreasing, but not for the reasons that the legislature wants. The Colorado Department of Education earlier this year reported the largest K-12 enrollment decline in over a decade.
Coloradans are rightly becoming suspicious of the apparent lack of return on investment in public education and are moving their kids out of schools.
The less desirable public schools are to parents, the less teachers should expect to be paid more, based purely on economics.
People do not get paid more simply because people think they “deserve” to or because they work hard.
In reality, SB-135 is a desperate attempt by the legislature to cover the ever-increasing administration costs across departments, but mostly in healthcare.
Ever-bigger government incentivizes fiscal ruin, and Coloradans will, unfortunately, be the ones to pay for the sins of their legislators.
