The diviners are at it again, trying to find out how much it costs, within a monopolistic education system, to produce an "adequate" education.

New Hampshire is just one of many states that have been subject to lawsuits concerning its method of funding schools. (Note that I said "funding schools," not "funding students.")

First, the Manchester Union-Leader:

The House-Senate committee was established in June to determine the cost of a constitutionally adequate education based on a new definition. The committee must issue a report Feb. 1 on how to determine the cost, how to help schools without kindergarten provide it and how to provide more help to needier schools.

The teacher union wants the state to bring in consultants to give them the answer.

The Concord Monitor adds that methods include "Expert Panels" (read: blue-sky dreaming) and looking at what successful schools have actually done. Some folks have in the past pushed for a doubling of school spending.

There's also, as has been the case in some other states, the question of separation of powers:

Meanwhile, some hope this will be the year that the state will enact a constitutional amendment to push the courts out of the funding battle that's been ongoing for more than a decade. They say that without one, the state will have to get an income or sales tax to cover the new bill.

In other words, the education establishment, in addition to litigating to get more funding for itself, can end up changing the very institutions of a state's political landscape.

A good follow-up to this article is Courtroom Alchemy: Adequacy advocates turn guesstimates into gold, published earlier this year in Education Next:

"Ensuring that sufficient resources are available for all students to meet state-specified learning standards is a laudable policy objective. Unfortunately, contemporary legal petitions for resource adequacy go far beyond the analytic capacity of present-day social science."

And I'll add an economic point in here. The best way to allocate resources, to determine the value of a good or service, is through the price mechanism. But nearly everything about the way we run schools is distorted in one way or another: teacher pay is based on seniority rather than productivity, district income is more or less guaranteed, and consumer's ability to exit is constrained by the human and financial costs of uprooting and moving to a new school district.