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What might be the most sweeping school reform legislation ever seen in North Carolina raced through the General Assembly last week.

Or it might not be so sweeping.

The details will be worked out later. The purpose wasn't to craft a finished bill but to meet a deadline. North Carolina's second application for a federal Race to the Top grant is due today, and Gov. Bev Perdue wanted it to include a school reform measure.

Whether a shell of a school reform measure impresses evaluators at the U.S. Department of Education remains to be seen. Maybe they won't look that closely. Whether actual reforms materialize and make a difference in North Carolina schools is also an unanswered question. Education leaders should do everything they can to produce results because too many North Carolina students desperately need to do better.

The bill authorizes local boards of education to initiate reforms at "continually low-performing schools" following any of four models: transformation, restart, turnaround and closure.

What's innovative about some of these models isn't clear. The bill says a board can close a low-performing school and assign its students to a better one. State law already allows that. Under the turnaround model, a board replaces the principal and at least half the teachers, adopting a new governance structure. The Guilford County board is doing just that at Oak Hill Elementary in High Point under the terms of a federal program.

The transformation model calls for "developing and increasing teacher and school leader effectiveness, comprehensive instructional reform strategies, increasing learning time and creating community-oriented schools, and providing operational flexibility and sustained support" -- fuzzy concepts but, again, nothing a school board could not undertake before.

The restart model has drawn the most attention. It allows a board to turn a struggling school into a charter school, but one not like existing charter schools that receive public funds but operate independently. These would still be run by the school board, and the educators assigned to them would be school system employees. What makes them innovative is unclear.

This legislation leaves it to the State Board of Education to fill in all the details for the four models. Until then, it's hard to know what to make of the so-called reforms.

If local superintendents have ideas -- and many do -- they should develop their own models and present them to the state board for approval. They shouldn't wait for the state to do their thinking for them. There seems to be enough latitude within the reform parameters approved last week to cover just about any initiative.

Of course, there's no money. An option such as "increasing learning time" -- one of the not-so-original concepts in the transformation model -- isn't free unless teachers give more time without more pay.

Maybe the money is supposed to come from winning the federal grant.