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There’s a plan afoot to put $20 million more into Arizona classrooms next year – without raising taxes by a single penny – but it’s going to have a helluva time getting voter approval in the November election.

What, you say? Who wouldn’t want to get 20 million more bangs-for-the-buck in education – the single largest bite out of our tax dollars? Who’d turn their back on that money, especially if it doesn’t come from our pockets but is taken from money we’re already spending (or misspending) on education?

Although it sounds so logical and so sensible and so needed, I can easily see Arizona saying “No,” with a capital N.

Because there is something that has, for the past 100 years, been more precious to Arizona than the billions we spend on public education every year. It’s called “local control” of schools, and it has given us a school district profile that not only looks foolish but resembles nothing found anywhere else in this country.

Pay attention, class, because you’re going to vote on Arizona’s public school system in November as you’re deciding who to send to the White House. And this Arizona vote could be just as important.

I remember rolling my eyes – or was I laughing out loud? – when I came to Arizona some 35 years ago and learned this state has 227 school districts. I’d arrived from Michigan, where every city did the self-respecting thing and had one district for kindergarten through 12th grade. In fact, that’s a pattern you’ll find in almost every city in the nation – one city, one school district. But here I was in Phoenix, which alone had 14 separate school districts within the city boundaries – 13 elementary districts and the Phoenix Union High School District.

OK, you do the math: 14 individual districts, each with several schools under their jurisdiction. That means 14 superintendents for the whole shebang, as well as their assistant superintendents. That means individual principals at each school and assistants there. That means each district buying its own paper and desks and school lunches. It also means 14 different elected school boards setting policy.

You don’t need a calculator to realize how those administrative costs climb astronomically as you accommodate this duplicating system. When I asked why in the world Arizona had ever done something so expensive, I was given a two-word answer – perhaps the most sacred words ever spoken in the Grand Canyon State: “local control.”

And I found that it’s been this way in Arizona for the past 100 years or so, a new district being created whenever a community grew or some landowner gave a piece of property to build a school (that’s why so many districts carry the names of Arizona pioneers).

“For decades, people have asked why there are so many school districts in this state,” notes Marty Shultz, a community activist and vice president of government affairs for Pinnacle West Capital Corp., the company that owns Arizona Public Service.

Shultz says it hasn’t made sense to him since his days in the classroom; he’s a 1966 graduate of Arizona State University who spent three years teaching reading at Longview Elementary School before moving into the administration of Osborn School District. He left education in 1973 to join Phoenix Mayor Tim Barrow at City Hall and has been a lobbyist and activist ever since.

He’s now the chairman of a legislative-mandated study group called the School District Redistricting Commission, which was assigned the task of finding out how best to unify Arizona’s schools into a more manageable – and less costly – entity.

“Business groups said yes to the change, but education groups don’t like change,” Shultz says over lunch in Downtown Phoenix. He’s probably never uttered such an understatement.

Here’s one clear gauge: For the past 20 years, the legislature has offered a “consolidation incentive” to financially reward districts that merge with one another. And in all that time, the only district to take advantage of becoming a combined K-12 program has been Kingman. (It had just two districts to start with, so this was hardly a ringing endorsement of the idea.)

But in 2005, the Arizona Legislature and Governor Janet Napolitano – in one of the few things they easily agreed upon – decided to mount a full-court press for unification of districts. Most legislators in both houses approved the bill that created the commission, directed them to study the issue, hold hearings around the state, talk to everybody involved and come up with a plan that makes sense.