Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The current special session of the Texas Legislature winds up today and, barring last-minute miracles, the state's leaders will have failed for the fourth time to deliver a fix for the state's public schools.

Even as the session is in the last hours, the only solution at hand is no solution at all - legislation that would leave the state's schools without the necessary extra funds to produce a workforce to meet the challenges of the future, but which would unfairly shift the cost to the state's moderate and low income taxpayers.

There are no clean hands in this failure. The state's three key leaders - Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick - are still missing the opportunity to raise the bar for public school education. Instead, they have been almost solely focused on property tax cuts. Yes, property owners bear an unfair portion of the responsibility of public school finance. But property tax reduction only makes sense if it's part of a broad tax package that asks every segment of the state's economy to pick up its fair share of the load.

Instead, the House and Senate have been hung up on just how much to raise the sales tax; in effect, this is a massive shift of the tax responsibility from the wealthy to Texans of moderate and low income. This amounts to the House and Senate conferees wavering between a bad bill and a worse bill. Passage of such a measure would ask the Texas families who depend most on public schools to pay more for the same school system.

Without a personal income tax on the table, the sales tax would have to be a part of a balanced measure that would include a broad business tax. But Perry and Craddick have shunned any measure that asks business to do its part. Dewhurst talked a good game about a broad business tax, but, in the end, voted against such a tax, breaking a tie in the Senate. He described his vote as political reality.

But real leadership from Dewhurst, or Perry, or Craddick, would ask business, as well as other parts of the Texas economy, to invest in public education of the first rank precisely because it's good for business, not to mention good for all Texans.

Instead, the key players seem to be more focused on the Republican primary in March than on what's best for the Texas of the future.

The governor has the option of calling yet another session to try to come up with an answer for public school finance. But unless all parties put schools first, and property tax reductions second, another session would be beside the point.