Translation - It might upset the apple cart and disturb all the worms & maggots in the process.
Paying for Schools: A series on how California pays for its schools
Over the course of a year, The Sacramento Bee has looked deeply into how public schools are paid for in California. In three segments of "Paying for Schools," published during 2003, reporter Deb Kollars peeled back the layers of such little understood funding categories as categoricals, mandates and revenue limits. What she found was a system rife with problems.
The first segment, published in February, investigated the $12 billion spent on categorical funding - a complex web of more than 100 programs ranging from gifted and talented education to dropout prevention - much of which is distributed based on politics and outdated formulas.
In May, the second stories ran on state mandates, through which schools get extra money for such routine things as teaching the Gettysburg Address and preparing for earthquakes. They have cost the state about $1 billion in the past five years.
In the final segment, on the basic underlying money schools get to educate each child, California has managed to turn a $29 billion responsibility for basic school funding into yet another obstacle course of inequities.