There probably are hundreds, if not thousands, of government studies being conducted in Kansas right now but none as important as the education cost study being undertaken by the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit.

Under pressure from the Kansas Supreme Court to base their funding of K-12 schools on the actual cost of educating students, state legislators are awaiting the results of the post audit study with interest and perhaps some trepidation. The last time legislators asked someone to study the costs of providing public education in the state, they got the Augenblick and Myers study, which was used by the Supreme Court as the basis for its demand for $285 million in additional school funding for this year and its threat to require more than $500 million a year more in subsequent years.

Legislators were dismissive of the Augenblick and Myers study because the spending it recommended seemed unrealistic and the performance of Kansas students continued to be above the national average. If the new study establishes a cost figure at or above that presented by Augenblick and Myers, state legislators will be hard-pressed to argue to the Supreme Court for lesser funding.

Barb Hinton, who heads the Division of Post Audit, has acknowledged the importance of her charge by putting all other business on the back burner and setting her entire 26-person staff to work on the school project. In the kind of methodical approach one would expect from the division, the staff has read 33 education cost studies from across the country. An outside consultant also will be brought in to assist with the effort.

In addition to assessing how much it costs to deliver a curriculum to Kansas students, the study must try to determine the cost of bringing students up to the performance standards set by the Kansas Board of Education. It’s not enough, according to the court, to offer an adequate education; the state must show that its investment in education is producing satisfactory “outputs” in the form of student performance.

Part of the Post Audit task is to draw some conclusions about how far the state’s educational obligations reach. Must the state fund numerous elective courses and extracurricular activities or is its responsibility limited to basic reading, writing and mathematics skills? That has been a topic of considerable discussion by some legislators, but Hinton emphasizes that her agency is independent and won’t be influenced by politics: “The Legislature never has said, ‘This is what we want you to find.'”

Legislators may know enough not to try to taint the Post Audit process by making suggestions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some preferred outcomes in mind. It also doesn’t mean they won’t have some strong reactions if the study they receive next January doesn’t meet with their approval. The contentious atmosphere of the just-completed special session could pale by comparison to the battles of the 2006 session.

Allen Rupe, the attorney for the Kansas school districts that started this legal ball rolling, painted a colorful word picture for the level of attention that will be focused on the post audit study.

“My clients and I,” he said, “are going to be like chickens on a June bug when it comes to watching that study.”

They won’t be the only ones.