When education funding reform debate heats up, it usually means hold onto your wallet and clutch your purse. Reform seems to have become a euphanism for "tax increase". But, it doesn't need to be that way because there is plenty of progress that can be made.

Illinois taxpayers spend $20,000,000,000 (that's Billion!) in local property taxes, state funding and federal grants each year to educate approximately 2 Million students. That's $10,000 per student per year...when I was younger that's what a year at Harvard cost.

If you do a Google search on education funding reform, you get 1,860,000 web results. There's a lot of material to process. So, I recently asked several experts in political policy and process at Northern Illinois University (by the way, going to the Silicon Valley Bowl on Dec. 30!) to help me organize my thoughts and the vast amount of research in this field.

I thank President John Peters, Professor Emerita Irene Rubin, Professor Mikel Wyckoff, Dr. Charlie Cappell, and Dr. Jim Schubert for sharing their experience and knowledge about the scope and method of social science research, statistical techniques to analyze information, data sets already gathered and entered into the N.I.U. computer system, and the creation of a framework to consider competing perspectives.

Here's a semester of work boiled down into a prescription for improvement, if we are really serious about education reform:

1. Determine what social variables most reliably predict and enhance student performance. How do we really define and measure variables like parental involvement, teacher competence and motivation, student aptitude, impact of early childhood learning etc. I mean, how can we properly allocate the enormous human and financial resources that citizens and taxpayers sacrifice, if we don't even know where we get the most bang for the buck?

2. Describe clearly and coherently what we are doing now in terms of resource generation (taxation) and allocation (school aid formula). If you want to see a senator break into a sweat, ask him or her to briefly explain Illinois' school aid formula that redistributes state and federal funds to school districts based on need, taking into consideration property tax revenue for each area.

3. List major reforms that have been tested and have succeeded in other states. The value of a federal system of 50 sovereign states is that we have a laboratory to discover the answer to the question, "What works?"

4. Select the yardsticks against which we can measure the relative social benefits of competing public policy suggestions for reform.

5. Maximize what works, minimize what doesn't!

I anticipate that Springfield education reform debate in Spring 2005 will revolve around HB750. Organized labor unions and other legitimate special interest groups are already advocating its passage before local school boards and PTA's.

This legislation promises no improvement in student performance, yet will increase your personal income tax by 67% (from 3% of your annual income to 5%) increasing the size of state government by $5,000,000,000, increase your corporate tax by another $600,000,000, apply a new sales tax on many everyday services by $1,000,000,000 (that's another Billion), etc. Proponents will put $2B into education, "promise" $2B in property tax relief (neither permanent nor substantial), and hand over more than $2B to state politicians in general revenue funds to spend however we like. I guess that if you like how we're spending your money now, you'll trust us to spend even more even better.

"I don't think so" on HB750.