The Gonski report on school funding is excellent. But better outcomes depend less on money, ideology and theory than political courage and love of learning.

Poor old David Gonski, chairman of the committee advising government on school funding, who has had the cheek to think that first principles and common sense might be a good starting point in trying to unpick what Emma Macdonald described yesterday as ''Australia's decrepit, illogical and ad hoc school funding system''.

Macdonald said school funding, last properly reviewed in 1973, was ''a tangled web of financial intrigue involving ancient deals negotiated between the Commonwealth, states and territories, and underpinned by a dazzling array of financial incentives, anomalies, bribes, threats and add-ons'', plus class warfare, and government and non-government school divides.

She didn't mention, though she might well have, extra problems caused by ideology and theory, whether as to the best paedogogical methods, ideal methods of training, appointing, and rewarding and punishing teachers, and assessing individual and collective school performance. Or the demands by different ''stakeholders'' for schools to give more attention to foreign languages, Asian languages, maths, history, grammar, manners, civics, Aboriginal and multicultural issues, and the environment.

Government additionally hobbled Gonski with a requirement that no student and no school (certainly no rich school) was to be disadvantaged by the loss of a single dollar, now or forever, as a result of the review. That has to mean extra spending - with money not obviously available, particularly as the Government scrambles for a surplus, however artificial, in the next financial year.

And - perhaps the biggest hurdle of all: The hope that government has reform-minded politicians with the courage and the vision to do something hard, bruising, and, particularly in relation to securing money and consent from state governments, uncertain. Consuming of time and political capital, and likely to encounter powerful opposition from powerful vested interests, including parent and teacher groups.

Gonski appears to have done a marvellous job. The general reception of his report on Monday was friendly, and the private school lobbies were fairly positive. Even an opposition which will not lightly support good policy if it deprives it of political advantage was stumbling in anticipating ways it might hurt too much uber-rich private schools.

Indeed the sourest note was the unwillingness of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to commit government to the extra expenditure involved. That is understandable enough, given both the balance sheet, the Commonwealth-state negotiations which lie ahead, and, perhaps, the possibility that the fate of schools reform may overlap another federal-state, public- private ''reform'' in hospitals and health care.

But even if the Commonwealth wants flexibility, it bodes ill for a ''reform'' when it is hardly adopted as a cause even on day one. Gillard, like Kevin Rudd before her, is fond of saying ''reform'' but has hardly even shown any great appetite for a fight or a long campaign. Perhaps she deserves some credit for persistence with the carbon tax, but the speed with which Government went to water over resource-rent taxing, and some other ''reforms'' suggests that she is now gun shy.

By now, moreover, the political cynic might be inclined to wonder whether, in any event, Gillard has the political nous to carry through any effective reform, even if she can survive as leader.

She has made much of her own transformation by education, and, when Rudd won office, wanted education as well as industrial relations as her prize.

Yet though it was from there that she stepped into the Lodge, it is by no means clear that she was a great success there, or that she showed a great policy brain or any particular courage.

Labor's 2007 education pitch to voters was based on its computer-for every-student plan, a typical example of the all-eggs-in-one-basket cheap and misleading diagnosis of the problem, sloganising and false solution-finding that has typified education policy in the hands of professional politicians, particularly in recent years. Access to computers has very little to do with any of the real problems of the education system, least of all supposedly slipping standards, and diversion of energy and resources in this direction only aggravates the real problems.

In office, Gillard was also greatly given to simplistic slogan ''solutions'', devised with the help of focus groups, to other invented educational ''problems'', as well as pseudo toughness for public relations purposes with teacher unions, most noticeably over national standards, NAPLAN, and the myschool projects. She imported, for PR purposes, slick PR operators with claims of having achieved fabulous results in failed education systems such as the US (where standards, everywhere, are far lower than in Australia) and studiously ignored much more interesting results and research from Scandinavia and eastern Asia.

Since 2007, Aboriginal school attendances and outcomes have not improved, despite doubled resources, and her government is now playing PR games about starving the parents of truants to enforce attendance. Whether in remote, in rural or in regional Australia, policy in Aboriginal education is shameful and unsuccessful. But not especially under-resourced. It's ideas and leadership, not money, that is short.

The global financial crisis caused Treasury to think that vast dollops of liquidity should be splashed about the nation, and Gillard deserves some credit for harnessing school building programs to this economic program. But she, and her sub-minister Mark Arbib, failed completely in playing political shotgun over a generally good and well-administered scheme (so that the scheme is now, unfairly, a popular byword for waste and incompetence). And, in claiming such credit as she could, she gave aid and comfort to the complete canard that the main problem of education is about money and buildings.

The Gonski report is, indeed, somewhat a part of the same canard. It is certainly true that school funding is a mess, and, particularly, an inequitable and deeply over-complicated mess. It is certainly true that it needs fundamental reform, and that opportunities to do this should not be squandered.

But it is simply wrong to think that differences in outcomes between different classes of schools (in whatever sectors) are the simple consequences of differences in resources poured in, with or without bonuses for disadvantage. At best, more equitable distribution might affect outcomes by 10 per cent either way.

Nor has the drift of students away from hard subjects, such as maths and science, or from foreign languages, (or even anything that could seriously be regarded as the study of English) have anything to do with resources.

Nor, for that matter has the focus put on national standards, or standards testing, helped, particularly, to promote literacy or numeracy. It is a sad fact that it has been a long time since teachers played any useful role in the debate about better schools; but it is too often ignored how little politicians, on either side, have contributed either. It's not, first, an argument about money. It's an argument about the value we place on education, and the rewards and punishments we associate with getting and giving one; about the environment in which people teach and learn and think. There's no reason why Australia could not have an education system twice as good - with benefits spread equally - at half the price. But that might involve waving about some textbooks, rather than some chequebooks.

Gonski Report Into School Funding