If only Colorado could spend its way to higher student achievement. Our schoolchildren would be in a much better place.

And yet, even as K-12 funding has been on the rise amid declining enrollment statewide — meaning even more dollars per pupil — student performance hasn’t responded in kind.

That was the upshot of data released this week by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute, reaffirming the truism that you don’t always get what you pay for. It helps make the case for changing course on school spending — unless, that is, the objective of ramping up funding in recent years wasn’t to boost measurable student achievement but simply to grow the public education bureaucracy.

Gazette readers will be learning more about the latest findings from the institute’s annual Dollars and Data study in coming days, but a quick take on the findings should give pause to education policy makers.

According to the study, overall public education revenue from all sources has climbed 9.6% in Colorado since 2020. Education expenditures totaled $16.01 billion in 2022, an increase of $705 million — 5% — just from 2021. It also represents an increase of $4.15 billion (35%) from 2017.

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