DENVER – Ready Colorado, the state’s leading conservative school choice and education reform advocacy group announced today that it is formally opposing Proposition HH, which will appear on Coloradans’ 2023 general election ballot this November.
“Any way you slice it, Prop HH is a bad deal for Coloradans,” said Brenda Dickhoner, President and CEO of Ready Colorado.
Up to 95% of the funds retained under Proposition HH will go to the state education fund, which the Common Sense Institute estimates will provide up to $9.6 billion for education through 2032.
It is critical to understand that the Prop HH education funding very likely will be used to fulfill current Amendment 23 requirements for increased education spending. Amendment 23 is an existing constitutional mandate for an annual increase in education funding.
This means that, in effect, Prop HH will simply free up General Fund dollars that would otherwise go to meeting the requirement to increase education funding each year.
Because of this dynamic, Prop HH’s main effect is to create a broad tax increase that substantially grows the state budget.
Further, Colorado’s school funding formula is broken, and we should not be devoting billions of taxpayer dollars towards a dysfunctional and inequitable school funding formula.
Colorado’s current school funding formula overemphasizes cost-of-living factors rather than student factors, which results in wealthy areas like Aspen receiving higher funding over more impoverished areas such as Pueblo.
Additionally, according to the latest CSI Dollars and Data report, many districts continue to spend a disproportionate share of their funding on administration rather than classroom instruction. Since 2000, the number of students has grown by 25% while the number of administrators has grown by 140%. And while state spending on education over that period went up 54%, teacher salaries only increased 29% and student outcomes (even pre-pandemic) have remained stagnant.
Without changes to the school finance formula, it is unclear how any increases in state education funding will lead to improved student outcomes or desired increases in teacher pay.
It is disappointing that while Colorado citizens are facing the largest property tax increase our state has ever seen, legislators decided to push a disingenuous, complicated ballot measure that slashes TABOR refunds while creating a multi-billion dollar, blank-check tax increase to fund political pet projects.
