The sun-struck teenagers at your local pool likely haven't the foggiest that, in the distant, granite strongholds of the state capital, the forces that direct Pennsylvania education are organizing and moving. And if they have their way, Pennsylvania will join 24 other states that administer high school exit examinations.

The Keystone Exams proposal promises to "ensure that a high school diploma is truly a ticket to success in the real world," according to state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak. It would "enable us all to move away from the inaction and controversy that have stalled efforts to make Pennsylvania high schools the best in the nation," according to State Board of Education Chairman Joe Torsella.

If only it were that easy.

There's no question that each year a number of seniors who lack essential academic skills graduate nevertheless. The sidewalks of Hollywood provided "The Tonight Show's" Jaywalking segment with dependably abundant source material, but does anyone doubt whether the same show could be shot on the streets of Pennsylvania towns and cities? Whatever academic competency checks are currently in place, the Keystone Exams seem to say, are not good enough.

No doubt tougher exams demand more rigorous training. Plainly, requiring demonstrated mastery of core academic subjects before issuing a diploma makes good sense. That the assessment be standardized across the state seems a more reliable system for assessing the value of a Pennsylvania diploma. Assuming the tests are well written, properly vetted and not permitted to outgrow their tank, there's reason to believe that students may benefit from classroom preparations.

But teachers are instinctively suspicious of the attention lavished on state testing. We see its blemishes, inefficiencies and loopholes. We know that no test, and certainly no state test, can take the full measure of a course's merit for a young adult. We foresee the continued removal of opportunities for meaningful professional development to make room for the bureaucratic tedium of counter-motivational in-service days. We worry that the essence of scholastic preparation, the transferable, bedrock attitudes and values that educational philosopher John Dewey called "collateral learning," will cave under pressure to teach to the test.

Dewey wrote that "the mere acquisition of a certain amount of arithmetic, geography, history, etc.," is not enough. He explained how "the most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. If impetus in this direction is weakened instead of being intensified, something much more than mere lack of preparation takes place."

Thus our intensifying focus on quantified measurements of educational preparation threatens to repel the goal at which it aims. Only by addressing the systemic obstacles that hamper learning and by creating conditions for increased teacher productivity can graduation exams contribute positively to school reform.

In the face of the persistent, deep-rooted problems that afflict our schools -- inequalities in funding, bloated class sizes, teacher turnover, urban dropout rates, parental apathy, negative public perception of the teaching profession -- the Keystone Exams initiative seems timid. It values outcome over investment and, despite its rhetorical heft, approaches the real trouble spots of education from a politically calculated distance.

Like No Child Left Behind, the Keystone Exams proposal oversimplifies the problems and purposes of education. And it does so manipulatively, by appealing to the public's and the media's desire for an easy explanation to our educational crisis. In this paradigm, the schools fail -- not the families, the communities or the governments.

Public education is foremost a local enterprise, the occupation of which originates within the family and proceeds concentrically to the classroom, the school, the community and, last, the state. State educational policy, because it perceives students at a remove, tends to favor one-dimensional representations such as test scores. Similarly, Newsweek, whose annual Best High Schools list wields heavy clout, arrives at its results by way of a remarkably narrow formula: It simply divides the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests taken in a school by the size of its graduating class -- that's it. Excellence is all in the quotient.

Such data-driven analysis has its place, as do graduation exams. But for Secretary Zahorchak and Chairman Torsella's bold vision to stand a chance, there had better be a reckoning of what truly ails us.

Obviously, the state cannot wipe away such ills with a swift act of legislation. Nor can it, however, convince its teachers that high school graduates come up short for lack of exit exams alone. To do this right, the Keystone Exams must be conceived as the finishing touch of a broader plan that treats the causes, not the symptoms.