Yellow Dog Democrat offers up a good criticism of the plan from a political point of view, and Cal has a good story on making Policy legal.
I think the funding is dead on this deal. The seven year license for the British lottery by YDD makes some sense, but I’m not sure it improves the state’s financial status that much.
He also mentions Georgia’s case of a semi-public institution to run it, but Georgia also created a new program with its lottery that specifically dedicated the funding to that program stopping the shell game. What might be salvaged out of this plan on the financial end is to look at either the British or Georgia case for potential savings (I have no idea on either subject honestly) and then dedicate the funding to
1) Revolving text book fund
and then perhaps moving towards all of the lottery money going into dedicated funds for different school purposes that aren’t existent now reducing at least the shell game aspects of lottery deals (and yes, Cal is correct, the lottery wasn’t started to fund education)
The problem is that the alternative to the Blagojevich plan doesn’t exist and until then, the programmatic end is important and right now, the focus is on the funding. Not a trivial matter by any means if one wants to continue funding schools, but it obscures important points about serious issues in education. That someone is talking about them is important in itself.