The past seven days have seen the Gonski proposals trigger exactly the kind of childish squabbling between political parties, school sectors, and interest groups that they are intended to prevent.
The first stone was cast by the Independent Schools Council when it reported modelling to show that some of its member schools would be worse off under Gonski.
Next came Prime Minister Julia Gillard, addressing the national conference of that same council. She was spooked, apparently: having previously promised that no school would be worse off, she now promised that every independent school would be better off.
Next up to the podium was Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott. He declared that non-government schools were hard done-by because they got only 21 per cent of government funding but had 34 per cent of students.
Meanwhile the Australian Education Union (AEU) planted 6000 'I give a Gonski' placards — one for each government school — on the lawns in front of Parliament House, and predicted a dire future for the sector under and Abbott government
The week ended with Opposition education shadow, Christopher Pyne, accusing the government of having a Gonski 'schools hit list', and promising to repeal any Gonski legislation in favour of the very system Gonski found to be haphazard, inequitable and counter-productive.
Thus the week ended with even greater uncertainty as to the funding of Australian schools than it began with.
The Opposition insists its policy is straightforward and definite. But does that square with its promised budgetary austerity? And what storms would face a government trying to repeal Gonski, should it be there to be repealed?
The Government, for its part, clearly wants to get Gonski up, but it has to get the states to pay their share. This is no easy matter when the four biggest states are in hostile political hands. Moreover, it faces its own deepening budgetary problems, and is rightly worried that Gonski will be good money after bad.
Gonski is commonsense itself: every school, irrespective of sector, should be funded according to the size of the educational job it is asked to do. All government funding, federal and state, should go through a single national body charged with working out the size of each school's job and apportioning funds accordingly.
The