I suppose it wasn’t too unusual, even in this day of gender equality, for a few of the men in the family — the fathers and grandfathers — to find themselves seated around the Thanksgiving Day table following a pleasant dinner, discussing national politics, while the women busied themselves with cleaning up the kitchen and keeping peace among the children.
Personally, I find discussions about national politics frustrating. For one thing, there’s very little an individual living in Pagosa Springs can do to influence the situation in Washington, DC. It’s like the weather; we can complain about it, but it’s going to storm anyway if it wants to. Then there’s the other big problem: that we really don’t know what, or whom, to believe. The information delivered by corporate media outlets might have some relationship to the truth, but then again, it might not. The media is, after all, mainly quoting professional politicians and professional advisors to professional politicians.
Who can trust anything national politicians tell us? They keep their jobs by telling us what they think we want to hear, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a bunch of lies.
But local politics… that, in my humble opinion, a different story. Not only are local government decision-makers unpaid volunteers (in most cases)… and not only do they live right here in the same town, and drive on the same roads… but we can actually attend their monthly meetings in person, and watch our elected leaders at work.
We can even, if we wish, sit down with some of them over coffee and discuss policy issues face-to-face.
So I find it slightly depressing to sit around the Thanksgiving Day table after dinner and listen to a discussion about national politics, and realize that most of the family pays little attention to what’s happening in their own hometowns. Maybe most people think the condition of our roads and schools and local businesses is unimportant? Or uninteresting?
Even statewide politics could easily have been a meaningful subject of conversation, instead of the national disaster going on in Washington DC… a disaster we will never know the honest truth about.
We could have been talking about, for example, the funding and operations of our Colorado schools.
In fact, let’s do that.
The Colorado State of Education Report published by the Colorado Education Association (CEA) last month specifically called out five changes that the union’s members support:
- Increased salaries for teachers and support staff, to “retain high quality educators through fair compensation.”
- Ensuring “sustainable workloads” including a reduction in class sizes and in the need to “teach to the test.”
- Mental health support for students and staff.
- A change in the state’s accountability systems, including an increased focus on “social and emotional growth.”
- Reducing, with the ultimate goal of ending, “public funding to corporations, for-profit entities and non-profits that partner with corporations. Ending the process of providing corporations tax breaks, incentives and fiscal support and instead utilizing these as methods to fund education.”
Most of these suggested changes imply additional funding of some kind. Perhaps tax increases? But Colorado voters appear hesitant to grant the state government more money unless it’s coming from sports gambling, or from tourists.
The final CEA demand, however — ending “public funding for corporations, for-profit entities and non-profits that partner with corporations” — would seem to require only a reordering of funding priorities.
Many of us in Colorado are uncomfortable with corporate welfare in general — tax incentives and direct grants of taxpayer revenues given to big corporations, in the name of ‘economic development’. As we mentioned a few weeks ago in a previous editorial series, Colorado hands out billions of dollars in corporate ‘incentives’ each year. Colorado Sun reporter Brian Eason mentioned some of those corporate give-aways in a recent article:
An interim study committee met for the first time this summer to begin reviewing the more than $6.6 billion in annual tax breaks on the state’s books. In that context, the Enterprise Zone [tax incentives], worth anywhere from $40 million to $80 million annually in recent years, is a drop in the bucket.
But no matter their size, the sheer volume of the tax credits being handed out begs an important question that state lawmakers are just now starting to consider: Why?
“A question this committee needs to ask themselves is ‘Does Colorado really need to be playing these types of games?’ ” Katherine Loughead, a policy analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation, told lawmakers at the committee’s first hearing in July. “Colorado is thriving.”
The state appears to have spent about $7.1 billion last year on K-12 public education. And perhaps $6.6 billion on “economic development” grants and tax reimbursements to corporations?
I support the general idea of redirecting tax revenues now being paid out to large corporations for so-called “economic development.” But perhaps CEA is concerned about a particular category of “public funding to corporations, for-profit entities and non-profits that partner with corporations.” That’s some pretty specific wording. You don’t often hear complaints about “nonprofits that partner with corporations.”
As many Daily Post readers may know, charter schools in Colorado are typically organized as non-profit corporations. Colorado law does not allow charter schools to be organized by for-profit corporations or entities. Some charter schools, however — once they are formed — contract for management services provided by non-profit CMOs — Charter Management Organizations — or by for-profit EMOs — Education Management Organizations.
Of the 7,000 charter school in the US, it appears that almost a quarter of them — about 23% — are assisted in some way by a non-profit CMO. About half as many — about 12% — are assisted by, or operated by, a for-profit EMO. (Our local charter school, Pagosa Peak Open School, for example, does not employ the services of a CMO or an EMO.)
Generally speaking, these management organizations handle bookkeeping, human resources, and similar services for charter schools that are too small to easily provide those types of services in-house. But in some cases, a for-profit corporation might handle nearly all aspects of a charter school’s operations.
This means that a certain amount of “public funding” is paid out to for-profit corporations and for-profit entities that help operate (public) charter schools in the US, and in Colorado. These entities “partner with” non-profit charter schools. Of course, even our conventional public schools hire for-profit companies to provide certain types of services — architecture, engineering, consulting, auditing, and so forth. It’s not unusual for state government in general to hire for-profit firms in certain instances.
If the national CMO and EMO percentages reflect the situation here in Colorado (and I’m not sure if they do)… then about 30 of the 250 charter schools in the state might be making use of a “for-profit” EMO in some capacity.
30 schools, out of about 1,900 public K-12 schools in Colorado. Maybe not enough to make a fuss about?
Maybe there are bigger fish for CEA to fry?