Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's secretary of education, says a friend tells him that the only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.

But Riordan's take on what he calls "the mess" in financing California public schools and his hopes for reform are right on.

It can hardly be called a system. As Deb Kollars showed in her recent series in The Bee, what the state has now isn't just unfair and inadequate for millions of children, especially poor kids; it's irrational, incomprehensible and inefficient, a product of a combination of special-interest politics, jurisdictional finagling and Proposition 98, a 15-year-old autopilot initiative that drives school spending without plan or purpose.

We're about to get another illustration: Even as the state is trying to fill an ongoing $14 billion budget deficit, Proposition 98, if not suspended by the Legislature, will force the state to spend an additional $4 billion on schools.

Since California badly underfunds schools and urgently needs to put more resources into the system, that'll please a lot of people, Schwarzenegger's budget crunchers conspicuously not among them.

Depending on how they treat California's high cost of living, some measures put the state's per-pupil spending among the lowest in the nation.

But because the additional billions will again be dumped into the system without plan or priorities, little of it is likely to make much measurable difference in the education of the kids it supposedly goes for.

Riordan understands that kids in inner-city schools often get the short end of the stick. He wants to go to what's sometimes called "student-based budgeting," a formula based on the real cost of educating every student, plus additional funds for every student in certain groups -- economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, special education students. He also wants to turn budgeting control over to school-site principals.

But that's only part of Riordan's big idea, much of which comes from his friend, William Ouchi, a professor of management at UCLA and author of a new book called "Making Schools Work."

School site control would also include the power to hire and fire teachers, to buy books and other materials and thus, presumably, to chose curricula and teaching methods. In return, principals -- and to some extent others at the school site -- would be strictly accountable for results.

The trouble, as Riordan himself acknowledges, is that he hasn't worked out any of the details. Would the budget include teachers' salaries? Teachers' salaries now represent the lion's share of the inequities among schools. The newest and lowest-paid teachers are concentrated in high-poverty schools; the best and highest paid are in the schools serving the affluent.

And if control over programs and curricula really goes to the school site, what of the consistency in program that seems to make so much difference in boosting achievement? In big cities, a huge percentage of children transfer annually from school to school. If students are constantly dumped into different programs, say from whole language to phonics in reading instruction, can they master the material?

Equally important, does Riordan understand that his proposals will, in the words of one observer of Sacramento school politics, set off "nuclear war"? Even his modest plan of consolidating the state's scores of categorical programs -- programs for gifted children or for class-size reduction -- will trigger attacks from the affected interest groups.

Still, as Democratic Sen. Deirdre Alpert points out, Riordan understands that some children are more expensive to educate than others, and that resources should be allocated by means other than the political sausage machine that does the budgeting now.

In that respect, he's very much in synch with the state's new Master Plan for Education, for which Alpert was the driving force. It calls for changes in school finance very similar to Riordan's proposals.

Riordon also sees the Quality Education Commission that the master plan created as a platform to begin his reforms.

That in itself shows a new openness. Former Gov. Gray Davis never allowed Kerry Mazzoni, who served as his education secretary, even to explore the plan's possibilities.

Riordan and Schwarzenegger are also likely to be more inclined to negotiate a settlement of the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and others demanding adequate resources -- teachers, materials, facilities -- in schools serving California's poor and minority children.

Davis responded to the suit by hiring high-priced corporate lawyers to argue that the state was not accountable for local school problems and to badger the children who are the nominal plaintiffs in the case.

That's a course Riordan isn't likely to follow. And any long-term settlement of the suit will almost certainly involve some of the funding principles that both Riordan and the new master plan have outlined.

Right now, we don't even know what it costs to educate a child, much less how it should be spent. Just to establish that would be progress.