Coloradans like their rights to choose the best schools for their children. This freedom is apparently so irritating to liberals they’re willing to spend millions to prevent it from gaining constitutional protection. 

It’s sad, out of touch and intellectually bankrupt. 

Amendment 80 is probably the simplest measure on a very long ballot. Basically, if you like your current educational freedom, you keep it by protecting those rights in the state constitution — no new programs and no new money.  

So why is it causing incontinence among the well-funded education establishment groups, including the teacher unions? They know they can’t fight the amendment on the content of the proposal, so they’re pulling out their well-worn playbook of head-fakes, personal invective and the usual dose of phony fear mongering. 

Amendment 80, proposed by Advance Colorado (which I advise), would take your current rights to choose the best school for your children and build a protective wall around them in the state constitution. 

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The groups are so fearful of losing the ability to hamper school choice and parental rights that they are saying, at the same time, it is needless and inconsequential and it will upend our entire education system permanently. 

It’s Olympic-level rhetorical gymnastics all designed to stiff-arm families’ aspirations for better schools that fit their children’s needs.

Let’s unpack it. 

First the education blob says since Coloradans have had school choice rights for decades, including access to charter schools, what’s the fuss? 

Well, these very groups are the ones constantly — unrelentingly — fighting school choice and parents’ rights. An annual rite at the State Capitol are the attacks on educational choice and school accountability. Lately, charter schools have been in the line of fire because they are popular, effective and don’t have to live under the unionized model that promotes mediocrity and endurance over excellence. Exhibit A is a bill this year that observers said would mark the beginning of the end of charters. 

Protecting your rights from these anti-choice, anti-parent, anti-school excellence groups is why educational freedom must be placed in the state constitution.

Their second attack is deeply false. The liberal establishment is claiming the amendment will be a four-lane highway to private school vouchers and they are spilling gallons of ink — and lots of money — to lie to Colorado voters. 

News flash: there is not one word in the amendment, nor in the official summaries in the Blue Book, about private school vouchers where kids would have the ability to take at least a portion of state funds with them if they picked a nonpublic school. Colorado does not have a voucher program in place, nor is it likely it will enact one. 

But the education blob has clearly found it’s a hot button, so rather than having the intellectual integrity to argue the merits of the text of the proposal, they are just making up a wildly speculative argument — throw the brown substance against the wall and see if it sticks.

With a straight face they are calling a llama an eggplant. Please ignore the fur and the four legs. 

Will it work? 

Consider the implication, however, of the claim Amendment 80 is designed to send buckets of cash to nonpublic schools. How would such a thing happen in reality? 

There is only one way: families would have to leave the schools where the blob bars the exits. If parents and kids were happy where they were, not one dime would depart. 

This is the why they don’t speak the quiet part out loud. 

Freedom irritates the education groups so deeply they are going to spend big bucks to hang onto their chance to pass statutes to hurt your school choice rights and continue to fight parental rights. Because it’s way easier to pass a statute than to amend the state constitution. 

They know an overwhelming majority of Coloradans support school choice, and appreciate the chance to exercise those rights. And if the discussion is about how the system the education establishment dominates is failing families, particularly in urban communities, they will lose.  

It’s a sad thing when groups representing educators, which should be engaging in substantive analysis and persuasive rhetoric, know they cannot be candid with Colorado voters.   

It is a shame they must live by lies. 

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.