Colorado is deep into the point of fixing serious legislative problems by legislating more problems.
That’s no more obvious than in the arena of education, and last week it was exemplified by Senate Bill 45. The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Nancy Todd, D-Aurora, was a well-meaning and relatively innocuous measure making minor adjustments to state education law. The bill sought to add student loans, financial aid and retirement to the long list of real-life subjects that school’s are supposedly mandated to teach kids before they send them off into the real world.
There’s no arguing that kids would benefit greatly by what Todd’s bill seeks to do: teach them how to understand college financial aid and loans, because it’s hugely complex and has become a massive burden on a growing number of college graduates in Colorado and across the country. Upward of 75 percent of all college students have hefty loans to repay after they graduate now, averaging more than $30,000. You can only assume that the remaining students come from very rich and very poor homes. Once again, it’s the shrinking middle class that gets punched with a growing financial problem.
For many students, it’s a crushing debt load that limits their ability to buy a home and digs into the quality of life. Or it falls to parents, who retire on less, later, or not at all.
So Todd is right in wanting high school students to well understand how serious student debt is. She, and most of the Colorado Legislature, however, are dead wrong in believing that the state should be legislating relative curriculum minutiae by statute.
First off, while some kids may not understand all the details of student loan debt, few have a choice in the matter. Either they borrow money to go to school, or they don’t go to college. The underlying problem here is that state colleges have been underfunded by the state and been spending money as if it were unlimited, because, for state schools, it pretty much is. While the state has for years reduced money spent on higher education in Colorado, colleges have been able to raise salaries and expenditures pretty much unchecked because they’ve simply passed all those unmet costs onto students through endless and severe tuition costs.
Cheaper loans, added curriculum and clicking of tongues does nothing to solve those serious problems.
What SB 45 and myriad other bills do is make public schools almost unworkable through endless and uncoordinated curricula mandates. In Colorado, we have allowed the General Assembly, by itself and through the State Board of Education, to usurp the power of local school boards, which is where curricula decisions belong. Here’s what state lawmakers don’t know or forget: In a school day that already doesn’t allow for all that students need and what schools are mandated to teach, what gets set aside to make room for something new? If a high school real-life class has to teach financial aid and retirement, do they quit teaching kids how to vote? How to read a health-insurance policy? How a pesky bill at the state Capitol becomes a bothersome law?
The job of the General Assembly is to fund schools, something it has serious problems doing. Tinkering with testing, curriculum, the Pledge of Allegiance, charter schools, college assessments, materials and even the Ten Commandments is irresistible to just about every legislator who has ever taken the oath of office — even Todd, who herself was a teacher and well aware of the nuisance, the danger and the tedium of mandates from the state and U.S. capitols.
Republicans on the state Senate Education Committee were right to point out that SB 45 is not the purview for the Legislature. But why start with this bill and not the hundreds of others seeking to get the whims of politicians into classrooms all over the state?
If this committee really wants to fix education problems, it will turn all of these bills away and ask the governor to create interim panels and probably a special session focusing only on de-legislating Colorado’s ridiculously overburdened education system.
In the mean time, there is a way that state lawmakers can make themselves immensely useful to public schools and higher education: Send money.