The state's insular political class - natives only - also has a bad habit of patrolling its borders and dispatching fresh policy approaches as if they were venomous things.

This is self-defeating and shortsighted. These choices have produced what we have today: a weak economy, poor job creation and poverty.

Traditional political alliances have led state leaders to reject the very ideas that are producing strong economies elsewhere.

For example, many corporations seek right-to-work states, and studies show that, as a result, right-to work states do better in the competition for economic development.

But because unions - Democratic allies - benefit from a closed shop, West Virginia's political class won't consider this.

Instead, it conjures up alternative theories to attract corporate attention - like smushing together separate political jurisdictions to create the statistical appearance of a larger market.

The same is true of legal climate. Sensibly, corporations prefer a fair environment; sensibly, competitor states provide policies like proportional liability.

But West Virginia gives its (native) plaintiffs' attorneys joint and several liability, so corporations that set foot on our turf get stuck with more liability for damages than they are responsible for creating.

Thus, we lack investment by multimillion-dollar corporations and have a surfeit of multimillion-dollar plaintiffs lawyers who help fund political campaigns.

For the same reason - political alliance - West Virginia indulges teachers' unions insistence that market forces should play no role in teacher pay - and all teachers must be paid the same amount of money.

Now state leaders wring their hands over the shortage of qualified math, science and language teachers - and the resulting shortage of the skills modern manufacturers need.

Well, if the state really wants more highly qualified math, science and language teachers, it should pay more for those skills than it does for teaching positions that can readily be filled.

For pity's sake, what would the teachers' unions do?

Start supporting Republicans?

The pity of all this is that when West Virginia policymakers decide to deal with a problem, they're as good as anybody.

The state's politicized workers compensation system produced noncompetitive rates that deterred investment as surely as garlic wards off vampires.

When the state privatized workers comp, it cut through a big barrier to better times. Other states study the example.

Similarly, West Virginia leadership made policy decisions that prevented the wreckage of its unemployment compensation fund. States that went the other way look on with envy.

Which brings me back to education.

In some counties, teachers of at-risk students wanted to try single-sex classes in an effort to turn failure around.

The American Civil Liberties Union swooped it, muttering about gender stereotypes, and ended the experiments. A state that has failed waves of students for years, mounted no resistance.

It didn't even bother to ask its own teachers what they thought.

I hope the state Board of Education, which now seems intent on results, will show some more moxie and authorize field trials.

One of the things teachers most want is an orderly environment. Proponents of single-sex classes think they cut distractions and help students focus.

U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas; and Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, defended such experiments in a column in the Wall Street Journal.

In 2001, they joined with then Sens. Hillary Clinton, a Democrat from New York; and Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, to sponsor a bill allowing such trials.

A 2008 Department of Education study found that "both principals and teachers believed that the main benefits of single-sex schooling are decreasing distractions to learning and improving student achievement."

West Virginia didn't win a dime in the competition for federal Race to the Top Funds.

But Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tenn., won the 2011 Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge with all-boys and all-girls freshmen academies.

Its 2007 graduation rate of 55 percent was 81.6 percent in 2011.

The Irma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School in Texas opened in 2004. It has been a Texas Education Agency Exemplary School since 2006 and won sixth place at the 30th Dallas math olympiad that year.

The all-boys Barack Obama Leadership Academy opened in Dallas last year.

What would happen if the state stopped letting special interests block new ideas and instead authorized several five-year trials each at the elementary, middle and secondary levels?

Could it help students the system has been failing? West Virginia should find out.

No, it might not work. But if failure is a lead pipe cinch, why not risk success?