The difficulty for policy makers, who must make decisions -- often without being sure of the consequences -- that are difficult to communicate and justify to constituents.

The frustration of educators, who must dedicate resources and energy to maximizing revenues -- often in ways that have little to do with their goal of educating students.

The growing distrust in taxpayers, who want good schools, successful students and reasonable costs -- but who often are disheartened by a lack of information and accountability.

The argument for simplifying education finance is strong: California should have a system that the public can understand easily, that educators can live under without altering the focus of their efforts to meet student needs and that the State can track with a minimal amount of paperwork.

But the most compelling reason for reforming the education finance mechanism is to align the system that pays for schools with the goals that the State wants to achieve in the classroom. California is already developing statewide learning standards, with assessment tools to match. The expressed intent of these efforts is to shift how schools are held accountable from process (how many teachers are hired, how many minutes are spent in the classroom) to outcome (what have students learned).

Once the new standards and tests are in place, school districts should devote all efforts to meeting student performance goals -- making decisions that enhance student learning and pursuing reforms that meet diverse student needs. That will be difficult for districts to do if they are still saddled with a financing system that counts noses and tallies paper clips as a means of ensuring accountability. Without a focused commitment on the part of political leaders and policy makers, it is unlikely that the financing system will be redesigned to march in step with the outcome-based education program that will soon emerge from the drawing board.

In addition to solving pragmatic problems and aligning dollars with goals, education finance reform holds the promise of bringing true equity of educational opportunity to students. The phantom equity provided under Serrano has not played out in the individual classroom, where students still are met with varying resources depending on their geographic location, the sophistication of their district's management and other factors over which they and their parents have little control. Reshaping the way money flows to schools would give policy makers the opportunity to look beyond dollar equality to the actual resources that are available for children when the school bell rings and classes begin.

Finally, education finance reform can create the context for crafting a rational answer to how much money is needed to provide an "adequate" education. It is difficult to build support for earmarking more resources for education without consensus on what a model system could look like: how big schools should be, what condition should they be in, how many teachers per student are adequate, how many classes should be offered in high school, etc. Identifying such a model system, however, will need to be approached carefully so that it remains a guideline rather than a mandate that usurps local flexibility to meet local needs.

Most experts agree that California once had a premier education system -- and today that is no longer the case. Much of the reform energy in the past few years has focused on restructuring school governance, curriculum approaches and methods of assessing outcome. But the Commission believes how schools are paid for is an integral part of how they function and how they perform. It is therefore imperative that the financing system be reshaped as a key step toward improving the educational outcome for California's children.