February 19, 2013 03:31 PM UTC

Another Shot At The Apple?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Not to be lost among the splashier debates underway at the Capitol, the Durango Herald's Joe Hanel reports today on an ambitious new School Finance Act proposal from Sen. Michael Johnston:

A state senator is proposing a $1 billion tax increase to fund the first major change in 20 years to the way Colorado pays for its schools.

Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, has previously sponsored controversial school-reform legislation, including an end to seniority-based job protection for teachers.

On Monday, he unveiled what he called the capstone of those efforts – a new school-finance system to pay for the reforms passed by the Legislature. But if his bill passes, it would not take effect unless voters approve a historic tax increase for schools.

“We see this as a once-in-a-generation chance to get this right,” Johnston said…

The Legislature currently spends a little more than $5 billion on public education. Johnston estimated his new system would require an additional $750 million to $1.1 billion a year.

Read more about Sen. Johnston's proposal here. In addition to increased funding generally, badly needed after years of cuts, what we're looking at here is the first real proposal to address the historic ruling in the case of Lobato v. Colorado–which ruled that education funding in the state is fundamentally unequal, and not "rationally related" to the constitutional requirement to provide a thorough and uniform education for all students.

The last such attempt to boost education funding, 2011's Proposition 103, bombed with voters, but in the wake of its defeat, it's become clear that many voted against it because they didn't consider it to be a sufficient remedy for the problem. That fact would seem to be acknowledged in Sen. Johnston's call for an additional billion dollars per year, a number much closer to what experts say public schools in Colorado need to recover from years of austerity and cuts than Proposition 103's modest and temporary tax increases could have provided.

It's increasingly likely that this proposal, or something like it, will be a big part of our politics very soon.