(Albuquerque) With the legislative session in full-swing and health care at the top of the agenda, it is easy to forget that K-12 education is the single-largest item in the annual budget, consuming nearly 50 percent of the state’s general fund.

Unfortunately, as a new study by Rio Grande Foundation scholar Harry Messenheimer, PhD, points out, the bang that New Mexico taxpayers get for their public education “buck” has become less and less over the last 15 years. In other words, as Messenheimer points out, “Unlike the private sector where competition forces productivity to grow rapidly (by 41 percent), government-run New Mexico schools have seen productivity drop by more than 22 percent since 1992.”

Even though the government-run schools’ labor force is producing less on average, ever-more money continues to be funneled to it. The unproductive labor force has been swallowing up nearly 80 percent of that money. And now the budget now moving through the Legislature includes a 5.2 percent increase for K-12 schools, not to mention $5 million more to expand pre-k programs.

Using math and reading tests’ data from the National Assessment of Economic Progress (NAEP) to measure education output and publicly available data on government schools’ labor and spending, Messenheimer makes a compelling case that the decline in education productivity both in New Mexico and in the nation as a whole is tied to its status as a public monopoly.

The problem, says Messenheimer, is that “Innovation is not rewarded in government-run schools. Thus, we are not surprised that while productivity in the private sector has been increasing by leaps and bounds, productivity in government-run schools has been declining.”

Concludes Dr. Messenheimer, “Because of incentives to innovate, markets work and government sponsored monopolies do not.” Messenheimer points to a variety of “school-choice” mechanisms including a system of tax credits in order to improve the productivity and output in the form of educated students that is generated by New Mexico schools.

Ultimately, any proposed solution that increases parental and student power vís a vís the education establishment is superior to the status quo.

The full study is available on the Rio Grande Foundation’s website at: http://riograndefoundation.org/downloads/rgf_education_productivity_project_2.pdf.