One bad board

It all starts at the top. There, the school board neglects its two key functions: setting policies and holding top administrators responsible for carrying them out. A district report in July said that the "role of the school board needs to be clearly focused." It was the most important job the board faced -- defining its own job. Yet the Evergreen study noted that "no action has been taken to implement this recommendation." Instead, the board has frittered away its time naming schools, lauding its own accomplishments and micromanaging textbook selections.

One consequence is that there is no instructional plan to see students smoothly from their first days of school through graduation, to make sure that what they're learning in elementary schools is what's needed in middle school and so forth. And though former Supt. Roy Romer ordered up a comprehensive guide last year, with a deadline of Feb. 23, 2007, staff who knew Romer was a short-timer simply waited him out.

And why shouldn't they? In a perfect organizational Catch-22, the district's own Accountability Office has no authority to enforce deadlines.

There's a chance for this to change if both Tamar Galatzan and Richard Vladovic win seats this month. Anything less will stick the schools with a board majority that fails time and again to fulfill its proper role -- and in fact continually illustrates it doesn't understand what that role is in the first place.