The biggest argument Gov. Angus King and the Legislature make against fully funding Maine’s education formula is that Maine can’t afford it. They ignore the fact that Maine mostly does afford it.

Lawmakers must marvel that they can underfund the formula for General Purpose Aid to Education by tens of millions of dollars and yet schools do not close down; class size, on average anyway, remains low; test scores do not drop. What sort of budgetary miracle, they must wonder, is this?

No miracle. When Augusta abandoned the formula, local taxpayers were left with the bill. Because Maine towns value education, because they will not give up on their children, because funding schools for them is more than just talk, they have accepted much of the load through their property taxes.

This added burden on the property taxpayer is why Augusta lawmakers have a budget surplus. It’s why lawmakers can blithely consider tax cuts while towns and cities struggle to hold down increases. The Legislature has gotten away with this for years but may be caught this year by one of its own task forces which looked at essential services for schools. Its conclusions, according to an advisor on the task force, found that schools woud need an additional $150 million in funding just to meet what the task force considers essential.

At the beginning of this decade, education funding consumed 34.4 percent of the General Fund. It now accounts for 27.3 percent even as General Fund revenue increased by nearly 50 percent. That is, as the state brought in more and more tax revenues, it made less and less effort to fund schools and relieve property taxpayers. So when lawmakers say they can’t afford to fully fund schools, ask them why they want to increase your property taxes.

The Legislature’s Education Committee has a chance this session to do something remarkable: It can for the first time in a decade admit to the cost-shifting that has gone on and put together an honest education budget that contains neither the sleight of hand nor the abused statistics of previous years.

To begin, lawmakers should announce clearly whether they intend to follow Maine’s school-funding formula or, once again, ignore it. The governor’s proposed budget for 2000 stands $171 million short of meeting its obligations. No one would expect the Legislature to make up that gap in a single year, but an expression of whether it intends to would help districts in their budgeting.

Another way to present a more honest budget is to do away with something called the percentage reduction method. The state is supposed to fund 55 percent of General Purpose Aid to Education, and does, on paper. But the method it uses to achieve the 55 percent is dishonest: It simply refuses to count certain education costs as part of the total. It reduces the computed costs of running a school until the amount of money it has dedicated to GPA rises to 55 percent of a false total. The real percentage funded by the state is somewhere around 45 percent.

The lack of full funding is not the only reason some districts feel particularly shortchanged. Alterations in the formula, wrought by political force rather than a desire for equity, have caused the funding gap between the richest and poorest districts to widen through much of the ’90s. The most egregious of the changes is the inclusion of local income in a formula designed to balance disparities not in income but property. The result has been to shift funds south, causing mill rates in towns in this region to rise unacceptably high.

Even if the Legislature decides it cannot or will not restore full funding it should at least alter its formula to reflect the true cost — more than $1 billion a year — of educating Maine’s children. It can do that by making the formula’s per-pupil guarantee reflect the actual mill effort undertaken by towns. The formula currently assumes the effort is about 6 mills when the actual rate is closer to 9. This change would redirect more money toward poorer districts, no matter what level of funding lawmakers choose.

The Education Committee has the chance to set things right, to give an honest accounting of how much the state is really willing to dedicate to schools and to give property taxpayers the break they deserve.