| By Alan Franklin - Jul 23rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Statewide Student Progress |
Breaking: Statement on 10th Circuit's Ruling on Colorado Christian University
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
CONTACT: Michael Huttner, Executive Director
303-931-4547
"We are disappointed by the Court's ruling, we believe that giving public funds to Colorado Christian University is a clear violation of the separation of church and state and urge the state to appeal," stated Michael Huttner, Executive Director of ProgressNow. "That our tax dollars will be given to Colorado Christian University and its President, right-wing activist William Armstrong for his religious crusades should outrage Colorado taxpayers."
Huttner added, "this decision will be cheered by the original proponents of the so-called 'College Opportunity Fund,' who have been trying to starve Colorado's higher education system of revenue for years and likely hoped for this exact result. For everyone who cares about Colorado's most valuable institutions, our public colleges and universities, this ruling is a disaster."
Read the text of the court's ruling here: http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/07/07-1247.pdf
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The COF vouchers were created in 2004, and in part replaced direct legislative appropriations to Colorado colleges and universities. Instead, students attending colleges such as Colorado State University have to apply for the money. The idea was to give the money directly to the students, rather than the university.
When the COF was created, the decision to make it available to some religious schools, but not all, made today's ruling inevitable. The GOP-dominated legislature (at the time) could have chosen to fund ONLY public schools with COF, or to fund ALL accredited colleges, which would have been constitutionally workable but would have been far more contentious--since that would have created religious school "vouchers" in the purest sense with no pretense. Few Democrats would have supported it.
As it happened, the current situation was made inevitable by subjecting COF to a silly "pervasively sectarian" test that allowed some religious schools but not others. It's true that this test predates the COF, but COF is by orders of magnitude the biggest piece of the higher-education pie in Colorado, since it substantially replaced direct funding of the institutions. Without COF, there would not have been the incentive for Colorado Christian University to sue.
The decision references the case of Eulitt ex rel. Eulitt v. Maine Department of Education, a case that upheld the state's right to exclude from funding all religious schools, since they "excluded all religious schools without discriminating among them or (so far as Eulitt discusses) using any intrusive inquiry to choose among them." Colorado's artificial distinction between schools that are "pervasively sectarian" and those that aren't eliminated Eulitt as a workable precedent.
It's my belief that the Republicans who pushed COF on the state anticipated all of this, and intentionally used COF as a vehicle to force CU and Metro State to get in the same line with private and religious schools for too few dollars. Given the amount of funding channeled through COF, it was nothing less than back-door privatization, enlarging the pie without adding a dime, and this in a state that already ranks close to the bottom for higher education funding.
Where do we go from here? Well, I believe the ruling should be appealed, in the hope that a different interpretation might limit the immediate damage this ruling would cause. But I also understand the reasoning of the court's decision--the rules of the program attempt to make distinctions that cannot constitutionally be made. And that may be the story of COF as implemented.
So we must undo the overarching problem that made COF necessary, another treacherous Republican subterfuge called the "Taxpayer's Bill of Rights." Once that's done, the stilted justifications for the College Opportunity Fund evaporate, and we can think about returning to a rational method of funding our most important institutions.