“It is the most contemptible bill I’ve seen dealing with education in the 17 years I’ve been here,” said State Sen. Janis Lee, D-Kensington.

Maybe it’s predictable that a Democratic legislator would be unhappy with the compromise school funding bill approved by the Republican majority in the Senate Friday and now headed to the House. But putting politics aside — something the Kansas Legislature never succeeded in doing with the school finance issue this year — there are plenty of things to dislike about this plan.

The good news is that it would increase funding to the state’s K-12 public schools by as much as $127 million a year. Legislators say they hope that amount will satisfy the Kansas Supreme Court, which found last year that the state had failed in its constitutional duty to adequately fund education.

However, just throwing money at this problem isn’t the answer. First, it matters where the money is coming from. Legislators contend that the money can be scraped together out of existing state revenues and cash reserves, without a tax increase. One way the House has chosen to carve out that money is to take money away from the state’s six universities — not just by reducing funds received from the state but by actually taking away tuition and fee money paid by students specifically to fund their education and putting it in the general fund.

As bad as that sounds, at least House members are identifying funding for the school finance bill. The budget passed by the Senate last week includes no funding source for school finance. Senators say they plan to dip into the state’s cash reserves and count on predicted revenue gains to provide school funding, a strategy that will be impossible to sustain over the long haul.

Passing the buck also is a funding strategy in the compromise bill. Legislators don’t want to raise any taxes to fund schools, so they’ve decided to pass that buck to local officials, giving 17 districts, including Lawrence, the right to raise their local property taxes to fund teacher salaries. Of all the taxes, people don’t want to raise, property tax is No. 1, yet the state is saying that will be local districts’ only option. Why should they care? The local officials are the ones that will take the heat for raising taxes.

Another facet of the measure, which is unlikely to please the Supreme Court, is its disequalizing effect on districts. One of the basic duties of the state is to provide a more or less equal educational opportunity to students across the state. This bill does exactly the opposite. Although it wouldn’t be their preference, wealthy districts would be able to raise revenue through increased property taxes. In smaller districts, with smaller tax bases, property tax increases would have to be much higher to have much benefit for the district and probably would meet with much greater opposition.

The sad part of this is that most school district officials around the state probably are beyond caring about issues of tax fairness or educational equity. They are willing to take whatever funding they can get, under about any terms the state is willing to offer it, in order to pay their teachers and continue services to their students.

It will be interesting to see if the justices of the Kansas Supreme Court are as willing as school superintendents to overlook the fiscal irresponsibility and educational inequity of the proposal the Legislature apparently plans to put before them.