“School funding” is becoming the new “gun control.”

Raise the subject with your neighbors, your colleagues, your friends, and be prepared for a necktie-loosening, shirt sleeve-rolling, handkerchief blotting, down-and-dirty fight.

Why? Because the politics of school funding have little to do with schools or money. The conversation quickly evolves into a debate about class, race and parental responsibility.

State Sen. James Meeks’ controversial plan to bus Chicago kids to Winnetka’s New Trier High School on the first day of school is igniting this very debate. He wants the state to lease the Illinois Lottery to a private company and use the cash to infuse more money into public schools, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich proposed in 2006. Instead, lawmakers are looking at the lease idea to fund a statewide construction plan