The National Governors Association is moving on after establishing National Standards in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Science.  With the final draft of the Standards posted on the community bulletin board, the sheriffs can move on to bring justice to another town. Left behind (uh-oh!) are the superintendents, principals, teachers, students and their families to implement these Standards on behalf of politicians on the move.

When the National Governors Association convened this week, the new chair,  West Virigina Governor Joe Manchin III “made good on his promise, announcing that his chair’s initiative would be Complete to Compete—an effort focused on increasing the number of students who complete college degrees and certificates from U.S. higher education institutions. His goal: Improve higher education degree attainment rates by 4 percent annually in each state” (“New NGA Chair Targets Completion,” Education Week, July 12, 2010).

Now this is a terrific agenda, addressing a real problem in the higher education continuum in the U.S.  The estimated 45% of students who do not complete four-year colleges is a tragic waste of time and money, both for students who leave college and the institutions that invest in them.  But what of the horse behind that cart? The students who have graduated, supposedly “college-ready,” yet somehow can not survive four years of post-secondary endeavor?

There must be something in the water at these annual conventions of the Governors that activates the attention deficit gene. They will not follow-through on a plan for education that requires them to get their hands dirty with the mechanics of schooling.  How will they align their state standards with the national standards, so that their states are best served? How can they preserve the jobs of numerous qualified teachers being cut this summer? How will they fund and preserve their most-deficient schools?  What kinds of continuous professional development can they fund in these schools? What new approaches to assessment can deepen the insights from standardized tests? What kinds of high school-to-college programs can they implement? These are a handful of implementation problems that the local sheriffs have left unsolved, as they moved on to the next town: college campuses.

Needless to say, the first year of their study will bring the startling revelation that students entering college are not prepared and thus more likely to drop out.  So when the K-12 system fixes itself,  the college attrition rate will be halved or quartered, at least. Needless to say, if they had spent that first year investing in formative assessment systems for high school performance, they might already be addressing the “college readiness” gap.  And maybe they wouldn’t bother studying “college readiness” for another year, since they were already addressing that problem.

But politicians (including some school boards and superintendents) have a need for an agenda to get them elected or hired or their contracts renewed. Whatever school reform accomplished over the last three years must be cast aside for a new plan, one that impresses their peers, the voters, or the school boards that they have the “change” that matters.  This cycle has sadly victimized public schooling, where change is measured over five to ten years and where real change must start in the classroom, not the statehouse.

Many of the teachers who leave the classroom this year will choose retirement to avoid this latest cycle of school reform, of unfunded mandates, of unresponsive regulation. They recognize when the sheriff has left town and left the hard work for the citizens. They know the NGA is too busy in the town on the other side of the county to be concerned with the town they “reformed.”

If the politicians in Washington seem unresponsive to local needs, we might assume they are just too far from us, but when the statehouse or even our school boards avoid  personal involvement with reform “on the ground,” we can only assume they don’t care.  Their careers are made by proposals, agendas and mandates, not the glacial changes from inside the school.  They suffer from the attention deficit that energizes campaigning and re-election and disillusions the stakeholders of reform.