A Question About Schools

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On arriving in the Upper Midwest - senior year High School - I was heavily harassed because of my "British Accent". My speech is close to Southwest Pennsylvania [never lived there, it is my mother's fault], but that is how the heard it, and before they even realized the REAL ways I am not the norm they jumped on it.

I have talked to southerners who say they have tried to disguise the accent since arriving in the North, and one Brit who was trying to sound Yank so as to avoid social consequences.

I think you are getting too focussed on the analogy, and neglecting the larger question which is, "How do we make public policy decisions about allocating limited resources to greater demands?"

In most of the public sector budget exercises that I have been involved in, the process runs something like this:

1) Individual departments/units/etc. create a list of desired, discretionary expenditures and put them in rank order.
2) Each of these rank lists is shuffled together by evaluating competing priorities and making decisions about which comes next, resulting in a final rank list. (typically this exercise will stop when you reach about twice the expected discrectionary budget)
3) All mandatory expenditures are projected (salaries, benefits, operations and maintenance, etc.)
4) All revenues are projected
5) Contingencies are reserved.

The difference between the revenue projection plus contingency reserves and the mandatory expenditures becomes your discretionary budget. You then go down the rank list, approving projects until you run out of budget room.

The real decision making happens at step 2. And sometimes you are torn--especially when you have dozens of "schools," one of which needs a huge project, which costs as much as the first priorities for the others put together. And rarely is it ever so simple as, "if we don't do this, we will have to close our doors."

? But my answer can be interpreted to the real issue. Which is too say, design a better and cheaper system using more advanced techniques that either weren't available or where not used, when you bought your first three computers.(or when you created your first education system)

In this case cheaper would mean a method of teaching groups of children without more man power and without harming the learning experience.

Better would just hinge on the implementation.

I probably shouldn't have assumed it could be interpreted on its own. His question gave what i assume he thought was a limited budget incapable of accomplishing the task given, this wasn't true but only because he was thinking in outdated circumstances.