America's fourth grade students compare favorably with fourth graders anywhere in the world. The same is not true of our high school students. A well-documented gap shows up in the eighth grade and becomes a yawning chasm by the time students graduate.

It's clear to me why this is the case. Our high school teachers are providing their students with activities that are more childish than those used by elementary school teachers. Visit your nearest high school today and see how many juvenile activities are being employed by teachers. You can walk into an economics class and find students playing monopoly. You can walk into an English class and find them making a collage. You can walk into a geography class and find them coloring maps. You can walk into a history class and find them building a model log cabin to study Lincoln.

The entire weight of the educational establishment is behind the use of these teaching methods. The prevailing belief in education is that it is better for the students to have their hands on a frivolous and fruitless activity than their eyes and ears on something meaningful.

Substandard teachers are under-challenging their students and completely turning them off to learning. Their "hands-on" projects are having the opposite of their intended effect. Students themselves recognize how silly and intellectually empty the tasks are that they are being asked to do.

Meanwhile the educational establishment is up to much more than promoting questionable teaching practices. Conservative politicians often accuse teachers' unions of protecting mediocre and even incompetent teachers. That isn't the half of it. The entire establishment is behind a system that recruits, retains, and rewards poor teachers. Our licensing practices attract a sub-standard pool of teachers as it is. Current trends in licensing will exacerbate an already desperate situation. Additionally, the growing demands placed on teachers by a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and misguided standards movement virtually guarantee a short career span for the few talented individuals that do happen to make it into the profession. The refrain of the once eager teacher is: "I didn't sign on for this."

As this goes on within our schools, valuable time gets wasted because public dialogue is focused on unworkable solutions. There are some 50 million public school students. There are a few thousand private school slots vacant. Vouchers are not the cure for what ails public education today. Giving a few more students access to different schools does nothing to increase the supply of talented teachers. There are simply too few to go around, regardless of whether or not parents have school choice for their children.

In the 1990s, politicians began talking about "tough accountability measures." Hundreds of millions of dollars got spent on developing and implementing standards that are broad and unenforceable. Everyone in education knew they couldn't be designed any other way. But also everyone knew how much momentum the standards movement had, so nobody in education had the courage to say "Stop! Enough!"

Then George W. Bush was elected president. At first he declared that he wouldnt be the nations superintendent. Yet he proceeded to gather together broad bipartisan congressional support for the ambitious No Child Left Behind Act, an act that would bring accountability to our nations schools.

No Child Left Behind was an empty commitment. It was never even close to fully funded. And its requirements have already fallen victim to waivers. It does nothing to build good schools. And I predict that it wont close bad schools either. There is a basic law to accountability measures in education: The tougher the requirements, the more waivers are granted or compliance dates extended. There is no public support for closing down schools when there is nothing with which to replace them. There is no public support for getting rid of teachers that arent highly qualified when there arent teachers to replace them. It works the same as an individual school deciding to raise its standards. When the dropout rate starts going up, the standards get eased. Nobody really has the stomach for the tough measures they say they do. Nobody really wants real accountability. And its just as well, because its the wrong approach.

True accountability is impossible. The reason is that education outcomes are hopelessly indeterminate. We can measure many of our inputs. Per pupil spending is the most basic measure of inputs. We can measure some outputs. But we can't connect the outputs to the inputs. My students may perform poorly on standardized tests, but you can't prove it's my fault. So what can the politicians do to me with these tests?

What gets called "accountability measures" often takes the form of more paperwork. The state standards movement continues alongside No Child Left Behind. Standards-based lessons are still in vogue. Unfortunately, the ability to write up extensively detailed standards-based lesson plans and units has absolutely no correlation to effective classroom teaching. Accountability measures are an insult to talented teachers and a comfort to weak teachers. Weak teachers hide their lack of classroom effectiveness behind their ability to produce impressive teaching documents. What we have in America is a force of impressive teachers--on paper.

Behind this force of teachers is a bloated and self-serving bureaucracy that is the educational establishment. It is generally left-leaning and is completely misguided in the teaching methods it promotes. Its ideas about education are constantly repackaged, but they are not new. We have politicians who propose overly simplistic and utterly deficient ideas, such as merit pay and vouchers. They are not new either. We have a standards movement that serves the interests of both politicians and the educational establishment but threatens to completely destroy education.

It used to be a popular perception among teachers that the prevailing wisdom in education has a tendency to experience long pendulum swings. But if pendulum swings were ever indeed the norm, they certainly are not now. There is no prevailing wisdom. Education reform is now headed in so many different directions that we cannot discern anything vaguely resembling a pendulum swing. Perhaps the best words to describe education reform today are frenetic stasis. Nobody has been able to launch education reform in the right direction, or any direction at all for that matter. Public discourse regarding education reform is remarkably like a school faculty meeting, in that much gets discussed and little gets resolved.