If you look at the ranking of states in terms of education, New Mexico has always placed in the bottom five in the country. What happened last week in Albuquerque will give you a clue to why the poor and dumb get poorer and dumber. During the usually benign February Mill Levy , the Albuquerque Public Schools lost out on $192.4 million when voters rejected both of their ballot questions. This money has gone toward renovations, new computers and new schools. Now, the largest city in one of the poorest states will have an even poorer school system.

School officials blame that they had lost touch with the voters, but it is more simple and foolish than that. In the week before the election, the school board and the superintendent had beefed up their feud with each other. The two sides fought their battles in the media, with the climax coming when the superintendent confessed to abusing alcohol and prescription drugs and took off to rehab. All this exploded the week BEFORE the mill levy election. You don't see presidential candidates feuding and heading off to Betty Ford a week before voters cast their ballots. They are trying to be president. As far as the school board, no one was up for election. It was just about money for the schools.

I won't go into an 'I believe the children are our future' rant because the kids in Albuquerque are already pretty vacant. Drop out rates are more than one out of three, every facility has multiple and chronic problems, and the abacus might be the most powerful computer in some schools. I used to work for an architecture firm that reviewed all of the APS school facilities, documenting what needed to be fixed and upgraded. I spent an entire summer inputting data and prioritizing the projects. Every school had problems. The roofs leaked, the floors were damaged and the kids were bored.

$192.4 million wouldn't have solved most of the problems, considering that APS consists of dozens of schools, but the lack of money only makes a bad problem worse. The school board can only blame themselves for this failure. Don't air your dirty laundry in the media. It will only turn voters off to anything you propose. The school board says that they asked for too much money and tried to raise property taxes too much, but that wasn't the real issue. When people see incompetence from the head officials, they don't feel inclined to allocate more money for a bunch of fools.

The last time APS lost the mill levy, which was about 10 years ago, the first cuts came to the creative arts. Music, art, and athletics disappeared from most elementary and middle schools, making school even less appealing to attend for 180 days a year. I will be the first to admit that I'm not a fan of formal education, seven hours a day, five days a week. I was baby-sat for as much time as I was learning something. I got up too early and stayed too long in buildings I didn't appreciate.

As these buildings get more and more dilapidated, it has a negative effect on the kids that attend them. Poor kids go from poor homes to poor schools to get a poor education, and what is the school board doing to ensure a better tomorrow? They are fighting with the drunk superintendent and alienating the voters. That's setting a fine example for the kids.

So what to do? What to do? I really don't know. The only times I was truly inspired to learn in a formal setting was when I had a quality teacher. I didn't care about cracks in the floor or leaky roofs if the teacher was someone worth learning from. Of course, New Mexico also pays their teachers less than about 48 other states in the union. That's a whole other column, but I doubt I'll remember to write it. After all, almost all of my formal education came in this poor, poor state.

Chris Jungle is stuck in Time Out until his attitude on education changes.