Reforming the Robin Hood system of school finance looms as the largest single issue facing the Texas Legislature.

For months, Gov. Rick Perry has said that he would call a spring special session on school finance if there was evidence a general consensus could be reached on the matter.

While that sounds like preemptive capitulation, it's premature to write an epitaph for the reform of Robin Hood.

Whether you agree or disagree with the Governor, his actions since the last election suggest no lack of resolve or determination.

The Texas Supreme Court has said that every student has a right to roughly equal amounts of education dollars

The suburbs are paying crushing school property taxes, a major portion of which are then exported to other, poorer school districts. No matter how much they tax themselves, they can't get substantially more money into their own schools.

That matters because less than a dozen suburban counties provide the lion's share of the vote for Republican statewide officeholders.

On the other hand, property tax poor school districts face the flip side of the coin. No matter how much they tax themselves, they can never raise enough revenue to fully fund their own students.

Many of these poorer districts are in rural east and west Texas and are also represented by Republicans.

On its face, solving the problem for suburban Republicans drops rural Republicans in the grease.

Government needs more dollars, which means someone has to pay more taxes.

This week, a legislative committee will study how to find the billions of dollars necessary to take the burden off local school property taxes.

The biggest pot of money -- a personal income tax -- is not yet on the table.

		WATCH THE VIDEO
	Robin Hood Legislators need to find a way to refinance schools.

Having exhausted the universe of new fees to balance the budget this year, the only other likely target is raising taxes on business.

The problem is that business interests have largely funded the Republican takeover of Texas.

How Republicans thread this needle may prove to be the best show in town this spring.