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How is it that governors – who have nearly ultimate power to change education laws for the better – spend most of the education space in their State of the State addresses year after year touting money as their "unique" answer to improving education in their state?

A review of Education Week’s digest of these traditional speeches shows that, regardless of party or state, almost all the nation’s chief executives punt to business-as-usual when talking about this most fundamental of issues.

The notable exception this year seems to be Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who announced he would seek to implement many of the recommendations of his Committee on Education Excellence, including the novel ideas of allowing non-traditional entities to enter the teacher-preparation market and pursuing new routes to earning a teacher credential. These recommendations won him the headline from Ed Week that the Gov "backs off planned ‘year of education’" – "back off," I suppose, because he didn’t offer the proverbial chicken in every education pot. Thus, the establishment believes, he has backed off his dedication to schools.

It all depends on how you look it.

Now the Gubernator, who has never been one to take the establishment too seriously, could be like his New Jersey colleague Jon Corzine, whose entire education focus is on money, despite his state, already among the top education spenders in the nation at $12,252 per student, being home to some of the most pathetic school systems in the world. Or he could be like the purportedly progressive Tim Kaine of Virginia, who rededicated himself to statewide pre-school, but who presides over one of the weakest charter states in the nation, ignoring for the second year now a reform that is much in-demand and, even more importantly, needed in the state. Or he could be like Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania who wants to debate how to give more funds to districts and how to create more than one end-of-school test for 12th graders, to ensure that everyone can graduate, albeit by bending standards.

Scores of policy groups and university researchers have concluded that within the public education system the reforms with the most impact focus on governance. Pushing authority and accountability down to the school district level remains one of the most promising and well-researched policy prescriptions. It cuts out the middlemen in a significant way, and with state standards and assessments still in place, allows educators to drive change locally, while still being accountable to at the state level. The ultimate implementation of local control are those policies that actually push authority to the family level by offering parents multiple educational offerings from which to choose. For education experts including AEI’s Rick Hess, University of Washington’s Paul Hill and dozens of others, these ideas seem to be all but a fait accompli in forums across the nation. But no governor seems to acknowledge that money woes can become more manageable – and transparent – when such power shifts occur.

A few mayors and their city chiefs of education have tackled variations of this on their own, and implemented partially autonomous school programs. But with labor and contract laws still in place, the full potential of such approaches are not being realized anywhere.

One need not be an historian to remember how once, not too long ago, there were governors who advocated in their annual addresses for fundamental changes, rather than just selling their audiences a laundry list of superficial offerings as if they were peddling their wares at the local market.

There once were governors, and a handful of state chiefs, who truly sought to improve schools and who dared to challenge the status quo to do so. Michigan’s John Engler, Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, Delaware’s Tom Carper are among those who didn’t use their annual state addresses to pander, but to implore legislator and citizens to shake off the comfort of the familiar, however inadequate, in favor of more challenging and more responsive schools.

They were among the first to embrace equitable (but not unaccountable) spending, to ensure standards – and consequences for those not meeting them – were in place, and to embrace school options for families, enacting strong charter laws and even low-income choice scholarship programs.

Others, like Tom Kean in New Jersey, pushed for alternative routes to certification, the beneficiaries of which now account for almost half of the Garden State’s teaching force.

The gradual pendulum swing in attitudes of state leaders was stunning. On the heels of governors pulling together at national summits in the late 80s and early 90s (bipartisan gatherings organized first under Bush 1 and then under Clinton) there was a slow but strong shift to recognizing that when most children aren’t learning well we’re in crisis, and there were successful efforts to address that crisis. Governors in Colorado, Massachusetts and Virginia were among the earliest adopters of high standards and strong assessments tied to those standards. (Sadly these have slowly been chipped away at since, as people without a memory for why they were implemented in the first place, or understanding of the positive impact they’ve had, have assumed various positions of authority and turned their attention to special interests’ demands rather than communities’ educational needs.)

The 90s also saw the enactment of new charter laws, and an attempt by state leaders to depart from the status quo by putting teacher quality and the whole notion of how public education is structured and delivered on the table to get beyond the standard "more money" solutions.

Eventually the fundamental conversation began to change, and quality education – not money – became the common denominator of proposals across most state and even from some federal leaders. Policymakers who still led with "more money is the answer" were considered ineffective and all but ignored. Reforms took hold across ideological lines, and it all seemed to culminate in the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, where, despite state and local concerns, there was a sense of unanimity that Congress should join the accountability movement and allow parents to have (albeit limited) options when their children are not well served by the system.

NCLB seemed to recognize the previous 15 years of state level reform efforts – even if it’s somewhat nationalistic. But since that time, the pendulum seems to have swung almost all the way back to pre-90s levels of ennui. Money once again is embraced as the answer. Money for pre-school, money for teachers, money for buildings, money for tests. Money.

There seems to be amnesia about what happens what states allocate money in the absence of true reform. In short, bureaucracies grow, creating regulations – and pet programs with reassuringly child-centric sounding titles – that suck up the money, but very little, either in the way of actual improvements, or even funding, ever actually really reaches the classroom.

In that classroom, teachers with outdated credentials that do not demonstrate subject-area knowledge preside over bland curricula, and in the schools in which they teach, their performance is rarely measured, while number of years teaching and degrees earned determine their salary. The pool of teachers remains smaller than it needs to be because of a fixation on input-based credentials, necessitating the kind of changes the California Governor recommended.

One would not know that by reading this year’s State of the State addresses of the nation’s chief executives. Making kids go to school earlier, keeping them longer, lowering graduation standards and raising higher education subsidies (despite the enormous number of remedial courses needed there to make up for primary education failures) are once again the norm in budget proposals.

When it comes to families, optio

ns outside of the district system that may better meet individual children’s needs still only serve around two percent of all public school students; in most school systems, children are captive attendants at the neighborhood school, regardless of how well, or if, that school meets their needs. A recent bi-partisan legislative push by Georgia legislators to give children more opportunities, by strengthening its charter law with the establishment of an independent authorizing body beyond the local school board, has been privately praised by the Governor, but not publicly pushed. The lack of a push for out-of-the- box solutions that work is a major difference between state execs today and those of just a few years ago. In those days, drawing school board opposition might be seen as a badge of honor, while engendering parental and business support for reform were the keys to political longevity.

It seems like all the conversation and activity surrounding real reform have escaped some of those in leadership, who instead turn to simple bandaids steeped in what has once again become the prevailing ‘conventional wisdom’ : money must be the problem, money must be the answer.

The states of 2008 feel more like 1984. Time for a change.