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Originally Posted by Koko Ed
Not likely,
It's probably more No Child Left Behind nonsense.
I think the government considers FIRST a private enterprise that has eduational elements. They'd rather put more money into actual schools.
That NASA supplies sponsorships and grants and is far as it will go.
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[Please, there is some minor political comments in here about the No Child Left Behind law. I am not criticizing/flaming any single person or party, but rather expressing my viewpoints on the law itself. Actually, both parties initially supported NCLB, so in a way I am criticizing both.]
Begin expression about NCLB:
Please don't get me started about NCLB. I really don't want to start a political flame war, but as a student who is in the top ten of my class, I know first hand how terrible it is. Sure, it might aim to try to bring the 'lower' students up, but it only drags the top students down. And I hate being deprived of trying to learn as much as I can, because the teacher has to shift his/her focus from teaching new material to reviewing old stuff ad nausum. 
End expression about NCLB:
And this is why I love FIRST; because there is nothing holding me back on how much I can learn about anything and everything.
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The $25,000 it would take to fully fund a FIRST team (a robot and two tournaments) would be play money in a special ed program that serves far fewer students than a FIRST team will. It's sad, but providing exceptional educational opportunities to exceptional students is not a priority in (most) public education systems in the US.
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Alright, here is a little more political comments.
This is like one of my favorite quotes from my physical education teacher.
"You have twenty tomato plants: ten of them are perfectly healthy, and the other ten are barely surviving. You only have enough fertilizer for ten plants. Do you give the fertilizer to the ten plants that are practically dead, and hope for a 30% increase in the amounts of tomatoes they produce, or do you give the fertilizer to the ten healthy plants, which would result in an increase of their tomato output of 80%? Sadly, 9 out of ten times the govermnent tries to squeeze tomatoes out of dead plants."
Anyway, now that I have stepped off the soap box, those are my two cents.