Trying to save 20,000 teacher jobs, preventing class sizes from going up all over the state, is a laudable goal.

But cobbling together a major education bill that combines gimmickry, big financial risks to school districts and reductions in local authority to handle finances flexibly – is less than laudable.

And doing the deal with no committee hearings and by suspending rules that give the public at least one day to scrutinize the language is outrageous given the large consequences. As The Bee's Kevin Yamamura and Diana Lambert reported on Thursday, the bill "emerged publicly less than an hour before lawmakers approved it in a late-evening Tuesday session."

Both houses passed Assembly Bill 114 in slapdash fashion that day and sent it to the governor at 10:45 p.m.

That was an abuse of the legislative process.

And while it may keep class sizes reasonable for another year, it jeopardizes local school district finances over the long term. In fact, it suspends 20-year-old requirements that districts demonstrate that they can meet their financial obligations for two years beyond the current year. That's the only thing that protects financially struggling districts from a downward spiral toward bankruptcy.

In a year when Gov. Jerry Brown, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez have touted the virtues of giving more authority to locals – "the level of government that can best provide the service," and increasing flexibility – this bill takes power away from local school districts.

To start, the bill defers the amount of money the state would normally send to local districts, so districts may have to borrow money to meet payroll. Fragile finances become more fragile.

Worse, the bill requires districts to assume they will get the same amount of money as they did last year, a questionable assumption. What that means, according to the Assembly analysis, is that districts will have to "maintain staffing and program levels" at last year's levels.

School districts that had wisely set aside money to meet anticipated future cuts will come under tremendous pressure to spend that money to rehire teachers and other staff who already received layoff notices. That kind of legislative pressure limits school district options for handling any future cuts.

And even worse, the bill undermines state laws that call for monitoring of the long-term solvency of school districts. The requirement, now suspended, to show balanced budgets for two years beyond the current year has been in place since 1991.

That wise legislation came after the Richmond School District went bankrupt and other districts were collapsing and going to the state for emergency loans. The Legislature in 1991 made it clear that even in times of tight budgets, school districts have to maintain multiyear balanced budgets and should not expect to be bailed out by the state.

It was a response to the fact that too many districts were backloading employee contract deals, dipping into reserves and spending more than they received.

Standing by that law is more important than ever.

Suspension gives unions license to say, "Hey, the Legislature says it's OK to presume stable funding for this year and not worry about the next few years."

The potential for saving teaching jobs and class sizes this year thus comes at a cost – potentially putting districts in a more perilous financial condition in coming years.

Could it be that the governor wants the teachers union's help in passing a tax initiative next year? Could it be that he doesn't want the union suing the state for underfunding schools, in violation of Proposition 98?

Perhaps lawmakers should add a provision requiring schools to teach Aesop's Fable, "The Grasshopper and the Ant," on the perils of improvidence.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.