Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Such is the case with the federal program called, "No Child Left Behind." The cornerstone of President Bush's attempt to reform public education, the program mandates that all public schools must demonstrate progress in educating children -- in Maine, high school juniors must take the SAT and those test results are used to measure the school's performance. If schools fail to make adequate yearly progress, they may be subject to sanctions.

To some, that means the "No Child Left Behind" program is a big, ugly stick. Mention those four words, and principals and teachers across the country react strongly. Here in Maine, one superintendent says the program's measures are "designed to smear public schools."

This past week, the state department of education issued the results of last year's testing, and more than half of Maine's schools flunked the adequate yearly progress measurements. That included a substantial number of schools in central Maine. And now, with a few notable exceptions, school administrators are busy flailing away at the unfairness of the No Child Left Behind act.

It's crude, they say. It's unfair. It's irrelevant to real education. It doesn't measure all the important things, like what kind of citizens we're making of our students. And worst of all, it allows a poorly performing segment of the student body to kill a school's chance of making the grade.

In the best of all possible worlds, we wouldn't need a "No Child Left Behind" Act to hold schools accountable. And we agree that there are many fine things that children, teachers and schools can and do accomplish that are never measured by the program's standards.

But amidst all the teeth gnashing and the griping, as teachers and administrators defend their failing grades, the real meaning of the act's name has been lost. Stop for a moment and consider the words, "No Child Left Behind."

Regardless of whether a public relations firm, politician or pollster came up with the phrase, "No Child Left Behind" has a profound meaning. The phrase itself instructs us that we, as a society, have failed unless we give every child the necessary advantages of a basic education. Those poorly performing students whose low scores make a school fail? Those are students who mustn't be abandoned and whose failure becomes our own failure.

What the phrase reminds us is that we must not leave any child behind -- not the ones whose parents don't care, not the ones who are uninterested in or unmotivated about going on to college, not the ones who have to arrange for child care for their infant so they can get to all their junior year classes.

Only about 25 percent of Maine high school graduates earn a college degree. Yet we live in a world where the long-term consequences of not getting a further education include poverty or at least relegation to a grinding form of servitude in low-wage, dead-end jobs.

There are schools in our region that, despite the odds -- rural location, poverty, tight budgets, low aspirations -- are making the grade. In North Anson, Carrabec High School has met the federal program's standards two years in a row, after revising its curriculum three years ago to be more rigorous. In Madison, the high school's beefed-up emphasis on literacy has pushed it into the ranks of the few area schools meeting the standards in both reading and math. Ditto for Messalonskee High School, where a strong campaign to prepare students for college has raised the percentage of students going to college from 65 percent a decade ago to 90 percent of graduates now.

This is a hard goal we have set for ourselves. We are not simply dealing with educational issues when we try to teach children in school. We must deal with their families, with their economic status, with their personal history. Education is a much bigger job now than it was 30 years ago. But is there a choice? Can we possibly say to any group of children that we will simply give up on them? That is the lesson we should take from the words "No Child Left Behind" -- that it is a hard goal, but the only moral one.