A SORRY development in politics in the last 15 years is that politicians and government officials have discovered the advantages to them of sophisticated, ethics-free public relations.

Time was when a governor had a press secretary who often as not swore, drank whiskey and spoke honestly off the record of things that would not be repeated on the record. Public officials and their staff generally spoke with the press.

There were, of course, public officials who didn’t tell the truth to the press and there were drunkards in both estates. But it didn’t occur to anyone that it wasn’t the democratic duty of officials to speak directly to the press on a daily basis.

Today, every political campaign, every governor, every government agency has a staff whose job is to control information: to “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” as the old song said. Speaking to the press is confined to authorized “spokespersons.” For ordinary staff to do so is a firing offense. (They do it anyway, but it tends to be the disgruntled who want to talk.)

“O tempora, o mores [Alas for the times and the manners],” I am wailing, because over a three-day period last week Governor Patrick’s flacks put out press releases praising his Education Action Agenda, also known as the Readiness Project. I’d praise it or condemn it if I could, but as The Boston Herald editorialized, attempting to evaluate it “is a bit like having to take an exam after only having read the course outline.”

The purpose of dribbling out the news day after day was not to edify the public, it was to make Mr. Patrick look smart. Those who would like to evaluate the initiative, which has been in the works for more than a year, have to either wait and see what’s in the small print or speculate around the margins. I will attempt the latter.

The late television journalist Howard K. Smith once said, “Complexity is to special interest what the briar patch was to Br’er Rabbit.” This plan smells a lot like Hillary Clinton’s 1993-94 health-care proposal and Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force, in that important people representing powerful interests met extensively behind closed doors to come up with grand plans. Then, they thought, they would trickle the good news down to Us, the People, at times of their choosing. Last week was trickle-down time for the Readiness Project.

The inside-game politics of the last six months say that the special interests are being signaled they should relax. With one exception, the education reform begun in 1993 in Massachusetts didn’t really need to be reformed, it needed to be tweaked. The exception: Reform largely failed in its reason for being enacted in the first place –– the vast inequality in educational outcomes between affluent suburbs on the one hand and poor cities and rural areas on the other hand. Undoing the abomination of school children being prisoners of the zip code they were born into is what we as a society need to be radical about.

Instead, the governor has been taking shots at what was working. In the months preceding “trickle-down week” he abolished the 171-year-old independence of the Board of Education and packed the enlarged board with his own appointees. He re-established the cabinet-level Department of Education discarded under Gov. Bill Weld in 1996. Through Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Mr. Patrick has line authority over all education matters as of yesterday (July 1). He gutted and ended the independence of the small Office of Educational Quality & Accountability, which some school-committee members and principals detested. Breaking a promise he made in the debate moderated by David Gergen on Oct. 19, 2006, to lift the cap on charter schools, he now wants to maintain the cap

These moves –– arguably inadvisable –– were signals to interests representing stasis not to worry. Or were they? Secretary Reville, who was there at the creation of the 1993 education reform, is no one’s fool. With the political ground made smooth by “signals,” it’s possible the forces of stasis have been set up to be double-crossed! That’s one of those things for which we’ll have to wait and see. Governor Patrick has instigated a debate that is just beginning in the public square. For that he is to be praised.

Among other very large items, the governor wants universal preschool, full-day kindergarten and free tuition at community colleges. Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, the legislative father of the 1993 education reform, believes the aggregate cost will be more than $1 billion a year. Mr. Patrick is quoted as saying, “We’re building a house. You design it first and then cost it out.” That may be how he built his manse in Richmond. You and I would first check our assets, then build a home that wouldn’t bankrupt us.

The Readiness Project describes itself as preparing for the year 2020. While withholding judgment until more is known, I can make two immediate conclusions.

First, there is too much emphasis on the needs of business and nothing I can detect about preparation for citizenship in a democracy. By comparison with the emphasis on math, science and high-tech gizmos, there is not enough emphasis on the teaching of English and history.

Second, a statistic: Third-grade black male reading scores are a good predictor of how many prison beds a state will need 15 years later. If the Readiness Project isn’t ready to change that, none of the rest of it matters.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.