I was in Moscow, recovering from a 12-day train trip from Beijing via Mongolia and Siberia, when I heard that Malcolm Turnbull's Gonski 2.0 shift to needs-based funding of schools had been passed by the Senate in the early hours of the morning.
So forgive me for being late to the party, but I can't let this key economic and social reform – surely one of the Coalition government's greatest achievements – go without acknowledgement and explanation.
The new act seeks to allocate government funding to schools, public and private, on a rational basis – the needs of individual students – rather than on what you got last year and what special deals you've done with politicians.
It seeks to phase out the decades-long sectarian basis for funding, where how much government assistance a student gets varies with the denomination of the church – or religion, or secular state – running their school.
Remarkably, Turnbull's success was achieved against the implacable opposition of the very people who spent the past four years professing to want "the full Gonski" – Labor, the teachers' union and, in the end, the Greens.
I'm still deciding whether Labor and the Greens were subservient to the union, or the union was staying loyal to Labor in hope of future largesse.
That Turnbull and his capable Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, were nevertheless able to win sufficient support from the minor parties, tells us the Senate isn't as unworkable as many suppose.
And whereas efforts to win minor-party support usually involve watering down the proposed measures, this time they significantly strengthened them – paradoxically, thanks largely to the efforts of Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.
These improvements included a new independent body to review the accuracy of the various measures of student disadvantage (as recommended by David Gonski's review, but rejected in Labor's "full Gonski") and shortening the phase-in from 10 years to six (so that all schools reach their proper funding levels long before they would have under the "full Gonski").
Because the act will unwind the special deals the previous Labor government did with particular state- and private-school systems, moving federal funding on to a uniform basis across the country, it produces both winners and losers among the states and religious school systems. Be sure we'll be hearing more special pleading from them.
To acknowledge the Turnbull government's achievement isn't to suggest its job is done.
For a start, although the amended act includes a mechanism that would claw back federal funding to the states should they fail to maintain their own funding, the states need to realign their own funding of public and private schools to fit with the new formula under which, by 2023, the feds will fund 20 per cent of the assessed needs of government schools and 80 per cent of the needs of private schools.
So the states should provide 80 per cent of the funding needed by their own schools and 20 per cent of that needed by their private schools. This will require increasing grants to some schools, but cutting them to others.
More importantly, ensuring public funding goes to schools on the basis of their students' needs is just the first step towards the ultimate objective of improving our schools' performance.
As we well know from the regular local NAPLAN and international PISA ratings of students' academic performance, our schools' performance hasn't improved, and in some respects has deteriorated from earlier years, while slipping back in comparison with other countries.
To me, however, the clearest evidence of our schools' poor performance is the shockingly high proportion of students – about a quarter – who leave school without an adequate education. That's a terrible failure rate.
Doing more to help our most disadvantaged students do better is almost certain to require more money. That's why basing our school spending on the needs of particular students is essential.
But it's just step one. If we could be certain the extra money going to needy students would be spent well without further intervention, our schools' performance wouldn't be as poor as it is.
No, the next step is to ensure the redirected money is spent as effectively as possible, on teaching techniques and interventions proven to be most effective.
There is, for example, a lot of evidence that "targeted teaching" – where teachers keep checking to ensure particular students have actually learnt what they've just been taught, and don't press on until they have – stops kids falling behind.
Similarly, there's evidence that using expert teachers to help younger teachers improve their teaching style, and to help introduce new teaching methods, works to lift performance.
The need to ensure taxpayers' money is being spent as effectively as possible is, of course, the object of the new inquiry Turnbull has asked The Great Gonski to perform.
It would be good to see him recommend setting up a national outfit to develop a body of evidence on the most effective teaching techniques, pass this to schools, and also conduct independent evaluations of new approaches tried in particular states or schools, making the results public.
And once we've lifted our schools' ability to teach conventional academic subjects, we should turn our minds to helping kids gain the softer skills – to communicate well, think critically, be creative and resilient – they'll need to survive in an ever-changing working world.
