Here’s an article from NMPolitics.net explaining, in part, the way NM funds public education across the state. It’s complicated, and one article isn’t enough to explain it all. The larger issue is, as the article closes on, what is the amount needed to educate the LCPS students appropriately in the 21st century?
The next big question is: Why isn’t $188 million enough to educate 24,000 students in Las Cruces?
As education is very “big” in terms of portion of state budgets, and in terms of number of employees, and in terms of its breadth of reach across the community of young people and families, and in terms of its impact on economic growth and development…people will keep coming back to the costs involved.
Education and healthcare, as PSA has repeatedly noted, are two huge parts of the US economy, and both are susceptible to disruption by enabling DIY cloud tools. Especially if/when affordable internet access is also the norm.
Present costs and funding structures will be compared to what those numbers might be after a transition to fully capable cloud DLE are available as an alternative. If, as seems likely, a case can be made sooner or later that better learning at lower costs is an option, that option will put enormous pressure on the status quo.
As with healthcare, the costs and funding structures of education are byzantine and opaque.
Partly this is so because both healthcare and education are fundamental human needs, some might say fundamental human rights…but hard to accomplish….and needs undergo change as well. So the structure of meeting those needs has evolved piecemeal, adhoc, and incrementally. We have ended up with systems few understand fully, and that seem extremely challenging to reform.
But it’s also because we as a society and nation need to somehow decide how much of each is enough, and can we afford to pay for that level of implementation?
That’s a tough set of questions for anyone theoretically, to say nothing of the challenge of deciding these levels through the partisan political process.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/School-district-budget-crisis-didn’t-sneak-up-on-anyone-NMPolitics.net_.pdf”]