Colorado has consistently trailed other states in how much money it spends per public school student and two studies released Friday show that, in order to fund schools at an adequate level, the state must spend billions more on education.
The results coincide with major questions over how the state will fund education next year as Colorado lawmakers try to shave spending across programs and agencies to fix an estimated $750 million state budget deficit. State leaders made significant headway last year when they both adopted a new school funding formula after 30 years and eliminated a $141 million debt owed to schools, pledging to fund them to the level required by the state constitution for the first time since before the Great Recession. Despite boosting funding for schools, that only brought them back to 1988-89 funding levels.
School district leaders ended the year worried that progress would be erased should the state target education as it considers how and where to rein in costs.
Some of their fears were allayed Thursday when Gov. Jared Polis released an updated budget proposal to carry forward with rolling out the state’s new school funding formula over six years, as originally promised, instead of over seven years as the governor proposed last month, according to reporting from Chalkbeat Colorado.
Still, the studies put numbers to the worries long shared by many school district heads and state leaders: Colorado is simply not pumping enough money into education to meet the needs of students and schools.
“At the end of the day, the analyses show almost identical to each other that we have a big challenge in Colorado and that we aren’t doing right by the difference of economies of scale, around differentiating funding for different student needs, addressing district size and addressing the base level of funding,” said Tracie Rainey, executive director of the nonprofit School Finance Project.
The results from the studies fill in a missing puzzle piece in lawmakers’ ongoing conversations about how to better fund Colorado schools, Rainey noted.
“Colorado needs to be able to use this information … to help build a plan for implementation so that when there are discussions about redoing school finance, it’s based on the information provided in these two studies,” she said. “And it’s hopefully kept out of the political arena but instead creating an opportunity to address the issue and figure out what the plan is for getting this to a point where we’re adequately and equitably funded.”
Two different approaches. Similar findings.
Both studies were commissioned by the Colorado legislature in 2023 through legislation that also created a Public School Finance Task Force with a goal to better inform the task force with realistic numbers about true costs associated with educating Colorado students.
Each study completed what’s known as a “landscape analysis,” which includes looking at the way Colorado’s school funding formula is structured, the different revenue streams that factor into it and how equitable it is for both taxpayers and students.
One study, led by Denver public policy firm Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, Inc. (APA), also compared current education spending to what it would cost for Colorado to adopt research-based practices related to things like class size, counselors, mental health resources, reading interventions and programs tailored for different students.
That study indicated that funding schools adequately would translate to spending nearly $13.5 billion on state education. That’s about $3.5 billion more than the approximate $10 billion earmarked for state education for the 2025-26 school year through the new school funding formula.
The other study, conducted by Virginia-based nonprofit American Institutes for Research (AIR), defines an even wider gap between the amount Colorado is spending on education and what’s necessary to provide students a sufficient education. That study asserts that Colorado must spend an additional $4.1 billion on schools.
The increase in funding would best be spent by allocating more money to students with greater needs instead of dramatically increasing base per-pupil funding, according to the study. That would focus the extra spending on those living in poverty, kids learning English and students with disabilities.
“This would help provide more equal opportunities to all students to achieve the state’s goals regardless of background,” the study states.
The APA study takes a different approach, recommending that Colorado boost its base amount of funding to spend $12,346 per student, up from $8,726 spent under both the current school funding formula and the new one taking effect next year. That increase would amount to the state spending close to $10 billion total base student funding alone, nearly $3 billion more than funding under both the state’s current school funding formula and its new formula.
Rainey, who assisted APA with the study, said elevating base funding would give schools more capacity to invest in more of those research-backed practices and resources related to class size, mental health, reading interventions and programs targeted to different students.
The APA study states that its suggestions pinpoint the amount of money “required for districts to meet student needs” but do not recommend the state to pursue any specific revenue or tax policies.
A series of other recommendations outlined in the study, similar to the AIR study, focus on increasing funding for specific groups of students who traditionally need more support. That includes giving schools more money to serve at-risk students, students learning English and kids with special needs.
Meanwhile, both studies call for a need to pay Colorado teachers more and decrease class sizes. The salary difference between teachers and other professionals with a comparable education is bigger in Colorado than in any other state, according to the AIR report. Additionally, Colorado’s student-teacher ratio is on the high side.
“We found that more efficient schools had higher paid and more experienced teachers, suggesting the importance of the teacher workforce in driving better student outcomes,” the study stated.
The study also touched on how academic outcomes among Colorado students have largely suffered while schools have operated with less funding.
On average, Colorado students “perform below the level of the state’s educational goals” and do not reach state standards for proficiency or college and career readiness, the study explains. Additionally, students’ academic outcomes documented by the National Assessment of Education Progress — widely known as the nation’s report card — have fallen over the past decade.
Rainey said that the new information will be valuable to lawmakers in the future as they continue chasing a widely shared goal of funding schools both adequately and equitably.
State leaders will have to decide which study they want to guide future decisions about school finance, Rainey said. Trying to pull recommendations from both studies would “ruin the integrity” of the studies since they take different approaches to analyze school funding, she said.
The study they choose will help them inform how to fund schools in the future, “creating a process and roadmap to get there,” she noted, and setting them up to answer a critical question.
“Are they willing to address tax policy issues in order to make changes in school funding that are going to make a significant difference for students in Colorado?”