In early November I attended the State Board of Education meeting held at Highline Community College.

It was interesting to see what their agenda, for improving schools, seemed to involve.

As with local school boards the discussion didn't seem to have a great deal to do with what could be accomplished in the next school year.

There was, I think substantial agreement that there is a "need" to improve achievement, but little discussion of any issue that I could see that would have impact upon what is happening in the classrooms.

The Board reviewed a study that they had commissioned regarding the validity of a high school transcript.

They discovered, what some of us already knew, that there was a great deal of "flexibility and creativity" in the transcripts offered by the 100 high schools that they surveyed. Attaining the status of a "graduate" seemed to be much more important than actually demonstrating any specific set of skills.

This appears to be a direct conflict with the Education Reform Law that school districts are supposed to be following. The report suggested that less than 50 percent of high school graduates have met the minimum requirements from the least competitive colleges.

While the report did not deal the skills that the majority of our high school graduates may have, I would suggest that many of these "graduates" do not have any marketable skills that would allow them to obtain living wage employment.

Many of these students "start" community college, where there are no specific requirements for admission, but few will finish with any marketable skills as well, either due to dropping out or completing a set of courses that did not include preparation for employment.

We do know that only about 14.2 percent of 9th graders will finish college in 10 years. This is well below the national average.

I concluded that this report showed that many school districts were less concerned about "skills" than they were concerned about "graduation."

I think that many of the State Board members came to the same conclusion. I suggest that the solution to this would be very unattractive to many school districts. It will be interesting to see what the Board might do to change this.

The other topic that I found interesting was a discussion on what to do with schools that continue to exhibit a lack of achievement.

The State of Washington, currently, does not have a method of mandating any kind of intervention in any school district which contradicts the No Child Left Behind law that requires, after several years of inadequate performance, intervention by the state to "cure" the problem.

I can't think of any of these interventions that have happened in any other state with success that would indicate that this was much of a cure, but nonetheless accountability is, I think, required.

The Board was presented with a proposal that had many steps before any intervention, perhaps too many.

Following this proposal there was public comment, not something that the Federal Way Board does very often, and there were no specified time limits on the comments.

Immediately the School Board Association (WSSDA) arose to object to this program. Their rationale was that school board elections, every two years, are the remedy for poor performance by school directors.

Unfortunately, I don't think that this has worked or we wouldn't have the number of school districts "In Need of Improvement" that this state faces.

This rationale might work in areas where there is an understanding of what is important in education if the future of the communities' students is the issue.

In Federal Way I haven't seen this kind of concern in over 10 years of being actively involved in education. We have high schools here that have very limited scholastic success, and I haven't seen any public concern about this.

If one looks at the agendas of school districts, at least the ones in Federal Way, there doesn't seem to be anything on the agenda that would indicate that the Board is moving towards any changes that are likely to improve education for the over 50 percent of kids that are clearly not achieving a skill set that will allow them to be contributing members of the next generation.

Board leadership in this area seems to be missing in most of the State and suggests, as a speaker after the WSSDA speaker, that maybe school boards are "obsolete." I would suggest that the results in most of this state would tend to support the speaker!

Our society needs to decide just how important is a quality education.

Is it important enough to insist on parent and student involvement, or is it a daycare program for a very significant portion of our youth?

If it is deemed "important" then the supervision of student activities has to be much more focused on the necessary acquisition of the skills required to be a contributing adult. In the home, on the streets, and in the schools this has to be a very high priority.

This seems to be the case in those countries where achievement out-strips us. If we are to be "internationally competitive," as the Washington law states, we are going to have to play by the rules that our competitors use.