The trouble with the long-standing tradition of “local control” in American public schools is that the control is not nearly local enough.

What “local control” actually means is that the decision-making powers of a district’s schools are shared by four bodies, none of which deal directly with students. The four are: the municipality, the school committee, the district’s central office and the labor unions.

In the best of all possible worlds, all four of those entities have their eyes unswervingly trained on the kids’ well-being and academic achievement.

In reality, however, they all tend to respond first to the demands, concerns and egos of grownups. Politicians, elected officials, bureaucrats and unions all need to make themselves indispensable to their constituents just to stay in the game. They jockey for control of resources and power. You can listen to a lot of heated debate among these groups without once hearing any mention of the kids.

As a system for supporting schools, this is useless.

Now, thank heaven, a heavy-hitter commission has recently released a report that confirms that the American system for educating its children is not merely broken, but an irredeemable car wreck.

The report, “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” is the result of an 18-month labor conducted by The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. The commission is a group of education chancellors, commissioners and scholars, business leaders, former cabinet secretaries and governors. The “New” distinguishes this group from the old Skills Commission, whose 1990 report was “America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!”

The executive summary of “Tough Choices or Tough Times” is available at http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm. If you are at all interested in schools, the economy or your personal economic well-being, you would be wise to read it. It’s a bracing splash of reality.

The commission writes: “The core problem is that our education and training systems were built for another era, an era in which most workers needed only a rudimentary education. It is not possible to get where we have to go by patching that system. There is not enough money available at any level of our intergovernmental system to fix this problem by spending more on the system we have. We can get where we must go only by changing the system itself.”

As radical as this sounds, none of the report’s ideas are new. The recommendations address such problems as teacher recruitment and compensation, school financing, testing and getting students into higher education more quickly. Because the solutions are radical, when you find yourself disagreeing, the feeling is strong. And the report obsesses about maintaining America’s economic superiority with the usual inflated rhetoric. But all of its ideas, even unappealing ones, are worth taking seriously.

Especially elegant is the commission’s solution to the problem of so-called “local control.” To wit: reverse the flow of the money and decision-making powers by giving the resources directly to the schools, instead of the districts. Because “we have built a bureaucracy in our schools in which ... the people who have the responsibility do not have the power, and the people who have the power do not have the responsibility.” Solution: Put responsibility, resources and power in the same place, right next to the kids.

Mind you, this technique would be far easier said than done. The report recommends that each state collect all revenue for the public schools, and then allocate to every child, no matter where she lives or which public school she attends, the same per-pupil expenditure — weighted, of course, to provide extra resources for children with special needs. (Vermont’s current school-financing system operates something like this already, so that state has experience working with municipalities unhappy with losing control.)

The per-pupil expenditure would follow each child into the school of his or her choice, in a manner much as charter schools are currently funded. The commission believes that all schools should be fundamentally independent and self-managed.

The report says, “The schools would have complete discretion over the way their funds are spent, the staffing schedule, their organization and management, their schedule, and their program, as long as they provided the curriculum and met the testing and other accountability requirements imposed by the state.”

Put the school — its staff, parents and immediate community — in the driver’s seat.

District offices would no longer manage with top-down authority, but would have to make themselves useful by offering support services for self-managed schools. One of the report’s signatories is Thomas Payzant, the much-heralded ex-superintendent of the Boston schools. He spent a good portion of his 11-year tenure wrestling decision-making away from state and municipal regulators and labor contracts, to get more control into the hands of the schools. His strategy was to “build school capacity.” While his efforts paid off in improved performance, the work in Boston is by no means complete even now. From the point of view of the report, the existing system made the work absurdly hard.

Opponents of site-based management and charter schools, which are self-managed, fret that autonomous school personnel might make a lot of horrible mistakes and crash the car. Too late. The car already crashed.

But as the report says, “The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work.”

Bureaucracies are great at organizing food service, transportation and back office functions. But they are no good at caring for kids.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.