Drillers are pumping less, and at around $40 a barrel, the state is collecting less in taxes on the oil that is pumped, making for a state budget crater of crisis proportions. The Republican-controlled Legislature has so far been loath to consider new taxes in an election year, and education, along with health and welfare, accounts for about two-thirds of the state budget.

The deeper story, educators and state officials said, is that a long-delayed day of reckoning over education policies and promises made in a different era, under different circumstances, has arrived.

In the mid-1970s, for example, when memories of the bleak and barren boarding schools for rural tribal people were still fresh, Alaska declared that it would eliminate the differences between rich districts and poor ones. Fairness and equity, the state said, would be the rule. Oil money allowed that promise to be kept, with the state paying almost $60,000 per year, per pupil, to educate students in some of the country’s most remote and isolated public schools.

The University of Alaska, gifted with a flood of oil money and federal research grants — which have also been in retreat — embarked on a path of ambition that included introducing new academic disciplines. As enrollment grew to nearly 29,000 students, the school built hundreds of buildings across three major campuses — in urban centers like Anchorage and Fairbanks, and in rural spots off the road system where the costs for heating fuel and supplies, all of which have to be delivered by airplane, can be absurdly high.

In 2006, when the stock market was near its peak, Alaska also shifted its teacher retirement system for new hires, from guaranteed pensions to self-directed plans similar to a 401(k). Then, to make the idea more attractive, it made benefits portable, meaning that teachers vested in plans could quit and not lose money that they, or the state, had put in. The result, as tough times have walloped the schools, is a flood of resignations, and teachers heading south with Alaskan money in their pockets, looking for new jobs somewhere else.