It’s good news that the nation’s governors have decided to get serious about the failures of America’s high schools.

As the National Governors Association heard recently, only 68 of every 100 ninth-graders are making it through high school on time, and only 18 through college. So how will we cope in a fiercely competitive global economy that places an ever-higher premium on advanced worker skills?

There’s a quick and seemingly obvious answer — slap on new sets of national or state testing mandates, possibly an extension of the No Child Left Behind Act. But standards alone won’t work. The time has arrived for basic redesign of high school curriculums, and with it a careful look at the critical transitions young people go through — elementary to middle school, high school to college or other technical training.

And who’ll get that redesign accomplished? National education consultants? Yes, maybe in part. But the real world experimentation and adaptation we need will occur (or fail) under the direction of the nation’s 15,300 school boards, which control most of the curriculums and graduation requirements the governors now want to upgrade.

School boards? Talk about a perennial dark island in American governance, an institution we’re all supposed to vote for but really know little about. Far too many boards get immersed in “micromanaging” schools’ hirings and firings and contracts, whether the buns in the cafeteria are warm or the buses are running on time — and not on the big policy steps necessary for fundamental improvement.

It’s high time governors and legislatures wipe clean the slate of laws now authorizing school boards and instead mandate what might be called “local education policy boards,” instructed to deal with the big school issues and leave the minutia of day-to-day management to superintendents.

A number of big cities — where school boards often degenerate into angry and divisive political dueling pits — have begun the transition. Either mayors or business-civic elites have succeeded in selecting nontraditional superintendents in such cities as Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami and San Diego. The results are no educational Nirvana, but the door is opened to thoughtful new experiments.

Sadly, in most school districts governance remains mired in micromanagement. School board members often use their powers to appoint friends as principals or teachers. Teacher unions, powerful in electing school board members, typically quash reform (and charter school experiments) in favor of their members’ convenience and job security. Big-picture change, appropriate to challenging times, isn’t happening.

State governments could use their immense powers to redefine the mission of local school boards, but rarely do, says Michael Usdan, president-emeritus of the Institute for Educational Leadership. Massachusetts, for example, has stripped school boards of power over personnel decisions with the exception of selecting a superintendent. “Reformers make an egregious tactical and strategic error in bypassing the school board issue,” says Mr. Usdan.

For a saga of the tensions, check out San Diego. Alan Bersin, a Harvard and Yale-educated former U.S. attorney, was appointed superintendent in 1998. He instituted a “Blueprint for Student Success” that focused laserlike on basic reading and math skills and intensive teacher training and retraining. His fast-paced reforms boosted overall elementary and middle-school achievement scores dramatically, even while narrowing the educational gap dividing white and Asian students from black and Latino students.

Though a Democrat and friend of former President Clinton, Mr. Bersin became a symbol of what the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program seeks to achieve.

But Mr. Bersin’s blunt “perform or else” style clashed with the city’s staid school system culture, and especially the powerful local teachers union, which had resisted his appointment from the get-go. With a contentious 3-2 school board split, Mr. Bersin was continuously a single vote away from being fired. Last fall’s board election switched the balance and Mr. Bersin departs this June.

The Bersin saga, Mr. Usdan suggests, is a metaphor for today’s national struggle. It suggests higher standards can be achieved — but only after bitter struggle with unions and local school powers who have political power and often more endurance than the “outside” reformers. The union-controlled board has already begun to dismantle key Bersin reforms, an ominous sign.

Second, Mr. Bersin failed to improve high school performance appreciably — and it may indeed take radical reinvention of high school itself to dent the worrisome national statistics on high school (non)achievement.

Finally, who controls school boards in cities such as San Diego where there’s not a “strong mayor” ready (like Chicago or New York) to do the job? Cities need more public-spirited board members, fewer special-interest and patronage-oriented types. That’s easier said than done. But governors and state legislatures, if they’re really serious about reform, could help by limiting school board powers to the big education issues that really matter. —

Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.