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Tucked away in Albuquerque's North Valley is Cochiti Elementary School, one of my beloved alma maters.

It was a vision in simplicity when it opened in 1961 - a reflection, I suspect, of how educators saw their mission: Keep it simple, Sally. And Dick. And Jane.

Cochiti was a brick, steel and linoleum affair that even in today's dollars wouldn't run anywhere near the $40 million-plus cost of the new North Star Elementary.

Obviously a lot has changed, but the 1961 Cochiti and the 2007 North Star in northeast Albuquerque raise the question: Must every new classroom resemble Mission Control at the Kennedy Space Center?

Perhaps now is the time to realign our thinking about public school facilities for Albuquerque and Rio Rancho public schools, specifically, our desire to build Steven Spielberg-like, blockbuster campuses every time we roll open a blueprint.

With APS Superintendent Beth Everitt's announcement that she's retiring in less than a year - seems like only yesterday she was explaining why school buildings cost so much - parents, school board members and anyone else who pays a property tax have an opportunity to consider if we aren't losing touch with the difference between needs and wants.

Two years ago, in response to those who felt schools like North Star and a new $100 million-plus high school were excessive, Everitt explained that nationally the mean cost for a school to house 1,800 eager learners was $213 per square foot - in 2003 dollars. And building material costs were only going up, she said.

Around the same time when Everitt was doing the math, local architects - who've pocketed more than a couple of dollars making buildings that "actually teach," as one claimed - rallied to each other's causes as they decried old, less-expensive designs. "Boxes," they called them.You know, like Cochiti.

Who can blame the architects? After all, who wouldn't want to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright on the public's tab? Or what politician, while promising a chicken in every pot, wouldn't also wisely pledge a laptop for every child? Find me an audio-visual guy who wouldn't swear kids learn better in Bose surround sound.

But can we afford all this? Better still, do we truly need all of this? Those blasted home-schooled kids, with their high test scores and academic scholarships, don't seem to need the sun and the moon to do well.

Parents want to send their kids to the brightest, snappiest school in the cluster. But given our schools' need for improvement, hip, mega-structures that "actually teach" seem more a substitution of ego for substance.

We owe it to ourselves and our kids to check our egos at the drawing boards. Dazzling architecture on the outside won't make our kids smarter, because learning, like so much of life, is an inside job.