In one of the enduring ironies most acutely found in California, no public policy is more mired in doublespeak and half-truths than the state’s system of funding schools, ostensibly places of fact and learning.

For example, Gov. Schwarzenegger says his 2005 budget will increase school spending by almost $3 billion. Not good enough, says the California Teachers Association. The CTA has launched a massive television ad campaign claiming the governor has “cut” and “shortchanged” schools by billions of dollars.

This is the noisy overkill Californians endure on a regular basis – a protracted dispute about a straightforward subject, in which astronomical amounts of money are routinely referenced and shocking lies repeatedly told. Can anyone be blamed for saying, “Let’s call the whole thing off?”

That’s why a new generation of leaders and ideas are challenging the most conventional wisdom about school funding and devising a novel solution: It’s time for the money to follow the students.

This approach would require that every school district in America allocate at least 65 percent of educational operating budgets on “classroom” needs, including teachers, textbooks, tuition and activities including music, museums and the arts. Instead of a new mandate, this idea will empower local control to determine how to apportion additional classroom funds, including raising teacher pay, reducing class sizes and adding additional instructional opportunities.

The driving force behind this “65 percent solution” is Dr. Patrick Byrne – the founder and CEO of Overstock.com – who is taking this idea national through an organization called First Class Education.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the national average for “classroom” spending is 61.5 percent. So what difference could be made by adding an additional 3.5 percent to classroom budgets? When the answer is fully explained, there isn’t a stronger argument in support of the idea.

If all 50 states and the District of Columbia had allocated 65 percent of school spending to the classroom in 2003-04, this would have made an additional $14 billion available to teachers and students. In only this one year, that could have provided a new laptop computer for every student in America or hired 325,000 more teachers – all without a tax increase.

In only a single year in California alone, this program would allocate an additional $1.5 billion in classroom spending, enough to buy 5,086,000 Dell desktop computers or hire 11,150 new teachers at a starting salary of $40,000 each. Isn’t this precisely what education advocates claim to be trying to achieve?

This is the intellectual fault line running right down the middle of this debate. First Class Education was not formed to merely find a convenient way to transfer education funding from one source to another. It is based upon the common sense that America’s school sites are financially mismanaged and ultimately cheated of true value.

While government spending on schools continues to increase, stories are legion of students sharing scarce, shabby textbooks, sweltering in crowded classrooms and being instructed by overworked teachers who routinely pay for school supplies out of their own pocket. This is a daily scandal in literally hundreds of California classrooms.

Most often, the loudest call goes out for more money. And when it is budgeted, politicians toast their success under a banner that reads “Mission Accomplished” and then forget about actual accountability and real results. But where does this money go?

That’s why the “65 percent solution” is a critical component of any school reform. It will attempt a school solution yet to be tried – making sure that billions in school funding are redirected away from administrators, bureaucrats and paperwork, and invested in the lives and learning of America’s educators and young people.

This solution is now being advanced by the leaders of both houses of the Arizona Legislature, the Texas State Senate, the State House in Louisiana and Minnesota’s Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty. Within six months, signatures will be gathered in eight additional states to put this proposal on the ballot for 2006.

It will be a shame if California – America’s foremost site of initiative-based direct democracy – is left behind and remains mired in a permanent school spending standoff.

There’s an education renaissance waiting to happen, and it can occur when more of the money we allocate to schools actually follows the students – onto campus, through the schoolhouse door and into each and every classroom.