The election bidding war over school education funding ignores how to get a better "bang for the buck" from existing resources.

Since the 1963 federal election debate concerning state aid for non-government schools, both major parties have fought intensely over how much tax funding should be allocated to Australian schools.

In 2016, the Bill Shorten-led federal opposition has attempted to gain the upper hand by committing to spend even more than the record-spending Abbott-Turnbull government has done over the past three years.

By their own account, Labor's funding commitment of $37.3 billion over 10 years is intended to conform to the former Rudd-Gillard government's interpretation of what "giving a Gonski" is all about on needs-based funding.

Casting aside the issue about how the schools package will actually be funded, with Treasury indicating further tobacco excise hikes, to help pay for spending, may deliver less revenue than anticipated, the opposition has enunciated doubtful modelling interpretations to advance its cause.

Shorten insists that a 2015 OECD study, Universal Basic Skills:  What Countries Stand to Gain by respected education academics Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, confirms that additional funding for schools will necessarily deliver massive economic gains in the long run.

The Hanushek-Woessmann study estimates the economic returns from attaining basic skills through education, enabling future workers to become more productive and adaptable ("agile", one might dare say) in a globalised economy.

The study encompasses 76 countries, including Australia, and the modelled scenario discussed here assumes full schooling participation and each student attaining a minimum of 420 points on the international PISA test (or the country's mean score, whichever is higher) by 2030.

In a rare, nevertheless welcome, canvassing of academic-quality analysis in an election campaign the Labor schools policy recites the OECD study to say, "high-school graduates with the basic skills needed ... by 2030 ... would be the equivalent of adding 2.8 per cent of our GDP today".

But as is often the case in the heat of an election campaign, Bill Shorten recently overcooked the case by claiming his party's education policy, incidentally not considered in the OECD study, would immediately boost GDP.

Embarrassingly for the opposition, Hanushek himself was drawn into the campaign discourse to correct the record, stating that "if we increase the achievement of somebody in secondary school today we will not see it in today's GDP".

Another misinterpretation potentially exacerbated by Labor's school-funding campaign is that, somehow, the federal opposition Gonski-inspired spending largesse would induce the universal access and improved test scores needed to achieve the 2.8 per cent GDP gain by 2030.

Now, most agree that improving the quality of schooling for young people would most certainly deliver economic gains, but what do Hanushek and Woessmann actually say about funding issues in their OECD paper?

It is true more facilities and a greater, high-quality teaching workforce would be needed in future, and that isn't costless, "but higher spending is not necessarily the same as higher achievement, as the record across countries shows".

Hanushek-Woessmann go further to add, "numerous programmes and policies that sound good and that have been introduced by governments in good faith have turned out to be ineffective at raising achievement, leading to increased cost with little gain".

The publication of the 2015 OECD paper isn't the only occasion in which these esteemed researchers have cast doubts over the link between increasing funding and better student outcomes in the school setting.

In their impressive recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations, Hanushek and Woessmann note that "simply providing more resources gives little assurance that student performance will improve significantly.'

To be more precise, the authors indicate "how money is spent is more important than how much money is spent".

Going back a decade ago, Eric Hanushek noted an array of econometric and experimental studies, not to mention observations of aggregate school outcomes, suggests "overall resource policies have not led to discernible improvements in student performance".

These kinds of assessments resonate in the Australian context, given the observations made by many education experts and policy commentators that rapid growth in schools funding by governments since 2000 has not necessarily delivered substantial academic improvements.

Recent rounds of PISA international testing, used as the basis of analysis in the Hanushek-Woessmann OECD study, reveal Australian rankings in the likes of reading, mathematics and science have slipped, both absolutely and in comparison with other OECD members.

An oft-cited empirical study by former academic, and now senior Labor politician, Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan illustrates a long-term trend of declining school productivity, as real per student school expenditure rises amidst declining literacy and numeracy test achievements.

The point made here is not that resourcing considerations do not matter in school education policy, a proposition belied by the fact that finances are, in fact, necessary to at least cover the fixed costs of providing schooling services throughout Australia.

The issue is that there is immense scope for improvement in the school sector once it is appreciated that, following Hanushek, "much remains to be learnt about when and where resources are most productively used".

An elevated, "better bang-for-buck" policy discussion could open up interesting reform possibilities, such as government schools managed by parents and other community members rather than bureaucrats, and encouraging philanthropic financing of education and for-profit schooling.

Other prospective aspects of schooling reform include deregulating teaching labour markets and better rewarding the best teachers, and cutting red tape to allow principals to manage their schools better.

One of the great tragedies of schooling policy in Australia is the creeping centralisation of policy control and finances, preventing states from experimenting even more with alternative models of schooling provision and funding to produce better outcomes for students.

So, less intervention from Canberra in education policy should also be in the reform mix.

It seems instinctive for the voting public to rally behind greater schools funding to signal how much we care about kids, so, in that sense, the politicians adding billions to the spending tab are simply trying to grant us our wishes.

But caring for kids isn't inconsistent with also demanding that hard-earned taxpayer money be spent on schools more efficiently and effectively, especially if we're concerned about preparing young Australians for the future.

And we can't forget the affordability aspects, either, with government budgets already overspent leaving our children lumbered with public debt.

Let's demand more from politicians than this spend-a-thon, and elicit ideas about better outcomes from existing finances already spent upon schooling.

ADVERTISEMENT