That would be commendable, as all Utahns - parents, taxpayers and teachers - have a stake in education and can offer valuable opinions about how to provide it equitably. The problem is timing.

Oddly, the group of legislators, professors, community activists and ethnic-group parents created by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has scheduled four of its six public meetings after Nov. 9, the date its recommendations are to be presented to legislators.

Holding public-comment meetings after the final report has been presented seems a waste of time all around and rightly prompts minority- and ethnic-group advocates to wonder how serious task force leaders are about making the process inclusive.

The group's chairwoman justified the late-in-the-game, town-hall hearings by saying the group's meetings were open to the public. That is a weak argument, as few people are likely to feel welcome at work meetings of a task force appointed by the governor, whether or not they are technically "open."

And what does the group intend to do with input it receives during the town-hall discussions? If feedback supports the group's final recommendations, the hearings will have served merely to rubber-stamp the plan. On the other hand, if people object to either the process or the outcome, well, too bad.

Some members of the working group don't wholeheartedly support its recommendations and believe their viewpoints were left out during the process of writing the five-part plan that will go to legislators and the governor.

Those complaints point to a closed-minded approach to the problem, which has a better chance of being solved if a range of opinions is discussed, including the salient viewpoints of parents and community leaders who represent the very students who are falling behind - 20 percentage points behind their white peers on standardized tests in eighth and fourth grades.

If some task force members' ideas have been stonewalled, that would taint the results of the group's work and make its recommendations, at best, less valid and, at worst, meaningless. Students are not well-served by a group that invites opinion and rejects it in the same breath after the deal is done.