It’s understandable that Kansas Supreme Court justices floated as a solution to the state’s school funding challenges the idea of focusing funding solely on students who are not meeting state standards.

But the court needs to be careful not to create a funding system that inadvertently rewards repeated failure.

During oral arguments Wednesday in the school finance lawsuit Gannon v. Kansas, Justice Dan Biles said the court only needs to focus on those students who are currently receiving an inadequate education.

“It seems to me that we’ve got … two-thirds of the kids are flourishing, a third are floundering. So it’s really none of the court’s business about the two-thirds,” Biles said. “They’re meeting the standard that we set, the test for adequacy. So our focus, the constitutional violation is on that third. And we have to target any remedy that we want to do toward that one-third.”

The courts have already ruled that Kansas’ method of distributing K-12 school funding is inequitable and the Legislature is expected to rewrite the state’s school finance formula in 2017. Wednesday’s hearing was focused solely on whether the amount of funding provided by the state to school districts is adequate. The ruling on the adequacy issue is of enormous significance to state government. The plaintiffs in the case, the Wichita, Kansas City, Hutchinson and Dodge City school districts, are seeking $800 million a year in additional funding, the amount the state would be spending today if it had kept up with inflation in the past eight years instead of cutting education funding.

The state’s financial woes have been well documented. Tax revenue shortfalls have been the norm throughout Gov. Sam Brownback’s tenure in office, mostly as a result of the governor’s own tax policies but also as the result of a lagging economy. The state is not in position to take on another $800 million in funding, at least not without increasing taxes sharply or implementing dramatic cuts to other areas of state spending such as higher education and transportation.

So against that backdrop, it’s understandable that Biles and his Supreme Court justices are toying with the idea of narrowly focusing the adequate funding question on just the state’s poorest performing students. After all, such a plan would be less costly to the state, which in theory is already providing adequate funding to the two-thirds of Kansas students exceeding state requirements on standardized tests.

But how exactly would such a system work? Wouldn’t giving additional funds to districts based on the number of underperforming students enrolled in the district be tantamount to incentivizing failure? That would be a dangerous precedent for the justices to set.

If the justices want to boil adequacy down to a math problem why not focus on the two-thirds of students who are, according to Biles, “flourishing” or at least meeting state standards. What’s the per-pupil funding for those students, and how much would it cost to apply that level of funding to all of the state’s K-12 students? While the total would almost certainly be south of $800 million annually, it would be, by the definition the court identified Wednesday, adequate.