Dream of a world where everything stupid, contemptible, or phony was also unconstitutional. That’s what the state Supreme Court invited Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher to dream about public education, and this week he delivered in Technicolor.

As constitutional law, it was dreaming too. But no one has ever provided a more incisive analysis of public education, a more brutal indictment, or a more comprehensive policy prescription. Moukawsher’s is the first decision in a school financing lawsuit in Connecticut that begins to see that, contrary to the complaint of the plaintiffs, education’s problems go far beyond any lack of money.

This lawsuit has been bouncing around for 11 years. Six years ago the Supreme Court could not muster a clear majority on what to do with it and so kicked it back to Moukawsher, instructing him to hold a trial and propose options for what, on appeal, the Supreme Court might construe the state constitution to require.

The plaintiffs, the usual gang for whom no amount of money will ever be enough because the education problem is not education at all but family disintegration caused by welfare policy, are claiming the judge’s decision as a victory. But Moukawsher writes that the constitution does not require more spending but more rationality in spending and that the constitutional deficiency of education is that much of what it does doesn’t educate.

Rationality, Moukawsher writes, requires first a formula for allocating state grants to local school systems. While state government long has been increasing grants to poor systems, lately no formula has been followed, just politics. Senate Republican Minority Leader Len Fasano says grants have been adjusted by the General Assembly’s Democratic leadership to buy votes to pass the state budget.

A rational grant formula would be easy to draft. The other counts of the judge’s indictment would be harder to address.

While enrollment is declining, the judge writes, state government spends $1 billion a year on school construction, half as much as it spends on school grants. Construction is popular and much has been done in response to a court order for racial integration, but expert testimony at trial said it does not advance education.

The judge confirms what every student knows but few educators admit unless put under oath — that public education in Connecticut is entirely social promotion, for there are no learning standards for advancement from grade to grade and for high school graduation. High schools, the judge writes, are “graduating illiterates” and “supplying students with unearned diplomas.”

Yet Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who nominated Moukawsher as a judge, often boasts emptily of Connecticut’s rising graduation rate.

The judge argues that rationality requires a learning test for graduation. Anticipating that many students will never pass one, he notes that various proficiency levels could be attached to diplomas.

While teachers were looking to the judge for more money, instead he kicks them repeatedly. Their evaluation system, he writes, is “virtually useless” because it has no connection to student learning — as unions insist. The same for salaries and tenure: “Good teachers can’t be recognized and bad teachers reformed or removed.”

And “special education” wastes millions on children who can’t learn because no one will take responsibility for deciding that certain cases are hopeless. “State standards,” the judge writes, “allow serious over-inclusion or under-inclusion in special education.”

The judge orders the legislature to resolve these sensitive issues in six months. Of course that won’t happen.

More likely the state will buy time with an appeal, the legislature will concoct a formula that approximates current grant levels, the Supreme Court will decide that judicial authority over schools stops there, and education will stumble on fecklessly as before. But at least someone in authority will have exploded its pretenses.