We then separated into small groups where we were instructed to "capture what a high school graduate should look like." We were told to focus on "soft skills" because that is what employers want in their employees. We came up with about 40 qualities such as assertiveness, a sense of community, and a global vocabulary.

The coordinators will now use these suggested qualities to help them determine the essential understandings for the district. As I understand it (although it's certainly possible I have misunderstood this part), the coordinators will then try to determine if the state standards correlate with the enduring understandings.

One of the teachers in my school googled "enduring understandings and found that it is a program offered by "the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)...a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that represents more than 175,000 educators from 119 countries and nearly 60 affiliates." (This quoted section comes from their website.)

Any comments? When I shared this my son, an engineer who has recently moved into management, he said only, "Welcome to my world."

What this plan is trying to do is admirable, and I suspect that it's a reaction to the NCLB's emphasis on memorizing facts for standardized tests – temporary knowledge that students don't remember in the long term, don't fully understand, and don't know how to use.

I'll digress for a moment. When I was in the corporate world, exceutives would periodically decide to create or revise a "mission statement" that was intended to make workers more efficient and effective, improve the quality of the company's products and services, and so on. After countless committee meetings and seminars with gobbledygook-spouting consultants, nothing changed. The voluminous reports generated as a result of spending all this time, effort, and money were long on abstract ideals but said little or nothing about how to achieve these goals. In short, they were all theory without any hint of how to implement the theory.

The goal of this four-year-plan is to give students lasting knowledge and skills that they will carry with them into the workplace and college, not (as NCLB does) mere facts to be regurgitated so as to pass a test and thus prevent the school from getting on the federal bureaucracy's "you bad" list. That goal is, as I said, admirable. If my college freshman had that lasting knowledge and those skills, my task would not only be easier, but I would also be able to help them to develop even more practical and enduring skills.

However, I don't see anything in this account about how this theory can be put into practice. How can teachers counter "teaching to the test" and start teaching enduring knowledge and skills? They certainly cannot do this if all they are given is theory without any specific tools or techniques to implement that theory.