Education reforms as normal behaviors spread over the long history of education, at home and abroad. Reforms push the development of education, but we have to pay for the development. The history of education reforms is a history of paying the price for them. There would be no development without cost. Now that the cost of education reforms is inevitable, it is necessary to review education reforms from the standpoint of cost. Reviewing the cost of education reforms involves questioning on the rationality of education reforms that whether all education reforms are rational and necessary or not. If costs are inevitable, what kinds of costs are rational? What kinds of costs can we bear? Who should bear them? How should we deal with them? We should and we have to consider all these rhetorical and practical questions.By dint of some theories in related disciplines, this paper probes into the cost of educational reforms through literature analysis and history research.In the first part of this paper, topics on the notions of cost in related disciplines, the relationship between cost and risk, etc. are discussed and the meaning, the characters and some manifestations of the cost of educational reforms are concluded. Moreover, great efforts are taken to distinguish rational costs of education reforms from irrational ones.Why are there any costs of education reforms? The author proposes that there are two kinds of costs of education reforms: inevitable costs and evitable ones, which result respectively from different causes. These causes are analyzed in the second part of this paper.Since the cost of education reforms is something bad to us, what should we do to prevent, to reduce and to eliminate the cost? As the means of reducing inevitable costs and eliminating evitable ones, the measures to prevent the production of costs are discussed in the third part of this paper. This paper focuses on the analysis of reformers' sense of risk and responsibility and suggests that only when the reformers' sense of risk and responsibility is enhanced, the aim of reducing or eliminating the cost can be reached.In fact, no matter what we do to prevent its production, the cost produces inevitably. How should we control those inevitable costs? The author believes that at the heart of the control of costs produced (which refers to as inevitable costs) is the equitable distribution of costs among different bearers. The reasons for equitable distribution of costs are analyzed, 4 principles of equitable distribution, principle of equity, of discrimination, of deserving and of compensation, are put forward, and 2 means of rational distribution, cultural and institutional means, are also suggested in the fourth part of this paper.