In all the hoopla over school funding adequacy, accuracy missed the party.

After the release last week of the Augenblick, Palaich and Associates study estimating how much Nevada should spend on public schools, some people might have been left with the impression that the report argued for increasing education spending by $1.3 billion every year. Actually, the study does not say we'd have to boost the education budget by $1.3 billion each year, every year to adequately educate our kids.

So flawed was the study's presentation, though, that no one who sat through it fully understood what Augenblick meant.

Bear with me for a brief explainer.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires Nevada's students to meet specific standards by 2014. Augenblick says that if Nevada had been forced to meet those requirements in 2004, it would have cost $1.3 billion more than the state spent that year.

The Legislature, which paid Augenblick $225,000 of your tax money to do its study, told the Denver firm to project how much the state would need to spend in 2014 to meet No Child Left Behind standards, accounting for annual inflation of 2.3 percent, but no enrollment growth.

We know we're going to have enrollment growth and, frankly, the 2.3 percent estimate for inflation sounds low.

But going forward, by the time we get to 2014, using the assumptions the Legislature told Augenblick to use, the state would need to spend $4.45 billion that year to meet No Child requirements. In reality, it would take more because we all know we're going to have enrollment growth, new school construction, more busing needs and, most probably, annual inflation higher than 2.3 percent.

Now that I've got the right numbers for you, let's talk about the biggest flaw in the methodology of the study. I'm not talking about the inflation rate or the decision to ignore enrollment growth.

I'm talking about the very notion of adequacy.

One of the "successful" schools Augenblick used to formulate this data is the elementary school for which my family is zoned. The school is deemed successful because it met Annual Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. Does that really make it a success?

I didn't consider the school adequate to meet the needs of my own child, who is about to enter his third week of full-day private kindergarten. And I'm not alone.

Just two days into the school year, parents were telling me they were disappointed to go from full-day preschool to a couple of hours of real school at the kindergarten level.

A mother of a high school student bemoaned her daughter's 46-student class. A middle-school parent expressed concerns about the 34 students in her son's class.

The Clark County School District officially started the year short 344 qualified teachers even as some retired teachers and professionals from other states find it impossible to get hired here.

It would be a miracle in 2014 for 100 percent of Nevada students to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind because so many kids bounce from school to school, and nearly one in five is still struggling to learn English.

I don't believe it is simply adequate to meet the No Child requirements. I want Nevada's children to graduate, to enter college without needing remediation and to compete with other kids from other states and countries.

At Thursday's work session on the Augenblick study, there was plenty of banter about those other states.

Joe Enge, of EdWatch Nevada, basically said there's no correlation between per-pupil expenditures and the success of a school. He cited other states, including Utah, with lower funding that have higher performance.

State Sen. Mike Schneider, D-Las Vegas, couldn't sit still.

"I'm getting tired of Utah, where you barely have separation of church and state," Schneider said. "If you're going to throw Utah in there, you might as well throw in parochial schools nationwide."

Enge shot back: "I think the comparisons to other states are completely valid unless you want to say Nevada students are stupider."

Fiscal conservatives like Enge only think taxes when they hear someone say that schools need more money.

Sometimes, in the right circumstance, more money does matter. Take the successful Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. It's much smaller than district schools, has smaller class sizes and spends $4,000 more per student than the district.

It was also deemed "exemplary" under No Child last year.

For the past four years, the state's school superintendents and school boards have offered their iNVest plan, suggesting $1 billion more needed to be spent on the schools.

It's a wish list of full-day kindergarten, extra school days and salary increases.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce complained last week that the Augenblick study didn't offer any policy ideas. State Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, complained there was no wish list.

Legislators must take the study for its worth: a fairly adequate look at how much money our kids will need just to meet federal standards.

It would be nice to wish for more.

Erin Neff's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com