The recent furor over the many flaws and unrealities in Gov. Ted Strickland's plan to alter Ohio's school-finance system has diverted attention from other grave mistakes in the education portion of the state's budget bill.

Foremost among these are the misguided changes it would make in Ohio's academic standards, assessments and accountability system.

Nobody says the present arrangement is perfect. But the 2010-11 state budget, House Bill 1, would take it from fair to poor.

Dutifully following one of the hottest fads in American education, the measure gives dramatically more attention to "21st-century skills" than to the three R's and actual knowledge. It ignores some key reasons we send kids to school in the first place. It sets lofty goals for which there are no practical gauges of progress or performance. And by changing the assessment system, the bill would make it far more difficult to compare the future performance of Ohio's schools and students with their past performance.

In January, Strickland opened the 21st-century-skills door -- known in the education field as "P21" -- when he urged that Ohio schools do far more to develop "critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, media literacy, leadership and productivity, cultural awareness, adaptability and accountability."

This theme made it through the House and now awaits Senate attention. It was -- predictably -- endorsed at a recent hearing by Ken Kay, president of the Arizona-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, who admonished the committee that "content-based" learning is "old-fashioned."

This is a path to educational perdition. Nobody says kids should only memorize facts, and everybody agrees that they also need to be able to think critically. But as every good educational psychologist attests, one cannot think critically unless one has something to think about. You need the core skills and knowledge at least as much as you need "cultural awareness."

Moreover, schools are far more adept at imparting the former than the latter. And no known assessment scheme can measure one's acquisition of such skills as leadership and collaboration. Once these replace computation, grammar, vocabulary and the causes of the Civil War as goals of schooling, we can bid farewell to accountability.

Unfortunately, that's one reason so many educators have climbed onto the P21 bandwagon. They know this is a way to evade being held to account for educational outcomes.

Yet of the six criteria that House Bill 1 would lay upon the State Board of Education for the new academic standards it is charged with developing, just one deals with "core content and skills." The rest are P21-style dreams that cannot be reliably assessed.

Nor is that the end of the problem. House Bill 1's criteria for Ohio's future school standards are entirely oriented to college and workplace preparation. That's important , but what about public education's obligation to prepare young people for citizenship; for knowing their country's history, geography and literature; for acquiring decent values and behavior patterns; for becoming good neighbors and competent parents?

The mandate to develop assessments to replace Ohio's current testing regimen also is well-intended. But besides all the cost and bother, the delay and the complexity involved, this move almost certainly will mean that future performance reports cannot be compared with past evaluations. Ohioans will have no way to know whether their schools and children are doing better or worse. District and school ratings -- e.g. "effective," "academic emergency" -- which educators, parents and taxpayers only just now are getting accustomed to, will lose their meaning. And the state's pioneering efforts to gauge the "value added" by schools to their pupils, based on the present testing system, will have to be scrapped.

The Senate should pause before assenting to such changes.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., and Ohio.