support education.[9] As the trial court observed, City schools are dependent on municipal revenues, largely from other kinds of taxes more susceptible to the vagaries of the business cycle (187 Misc 2d at 98). It may well be that this susceptibility hinders City schools from developing a more stable budgetary plan -- and that any plan to improve City schools that required better local tax effort, in particular, would need to address this matter. At the same time, the State has suggested that reforms tending to concentrate responsibility with the Mayor of New York City may prove beneficial, and we do not know that a "sustained and stable funding" requirement addressing fiscal dependency would necessarily fit together with such reforms. Accordingly, while the trial court's directive is understandable, we do not make it mandatory. Fourth, as the foregoing implies, the trial court properly indicated that reforms may address governance as well as the school funding system. Various factors alleged by the State as causes of deficiencies in the schools -- and rejected by us on the ground that the State has ultimate responsibility for the conduct of its agents and the quality of education in New York City public schools -- may be addressed legislatively or administratively as part of the remedy. We do not think such measures will obviate the need for changes to the funding system, but they may affect the scope of such changes. Finally, we know of no practical way to determine whether members of the political branches have complied with an order that the funding process become as transparent as possible, and we therefore decline to incorporate such a directive into our order. No one, however, disputes the trial court's description of the existing education funding scheme as needlessly complex, malleable and not designed to align funding with need (187 Misc 2d at 82-90). The causes are worth considering. As Levittown indicates, the justification for a school funding system based on local taxation is "the preservation and promotion of local control of education" (57 2 at 44). Conversely, the purposes of State aid to schools are, according to the SED, to assist school districts in providing an effective education; maintain a State-local partnership in public education; equalize school revenues by providing State aid in inverse proportion to each school district's ability to raise local revenues; and to encourage model programs to address the needs of the school community. Clearly these purposes reflect a recognition that inputs should be calibrated to student need and hence that State aid should increase where need is high and local ability to pay is low.