Failures canhide successes

The word "fail" turns up often in newspaper stories about schools' standings with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This is, in certain cases, unfortunate.

We don't mean to imply that the law's too tough, or that it saddles districts with negative labels they don't deserve.

In fact we think the law is one of President George W. Bush's most noteworthy successes. We like the law because it encourages school officials to consider their students as individuals rather than as a group. No Child Left Behind makes it much less likely that the success of one small cadre of high-achieving students will obscure, behind the cloak of statistical averages, the sluggish progress of another group of students.

Nonetheless, we fear that readers might focus on "fail" and thus not realize that the school district in question is, on the whole, succeeding in more ways than it is not.

The Baker School District's most recent results illustrate the point.

Although four of the six schools for which results are available met every standard of No Child Left Behind, the district, in essence, "failed" because two schools fell short of a few statistical measures.

But even at those schools — Baker High School and South Baker Elementary — the results are not completely negative.

At BHS, for instance, 58.1 percent of students who are, based on the law's provisions, "economically disadvantaged," were sufficiently proficient in math. According to the law, however, if fewer than 59 percent of those students are proficient, then the entire school has failed to make adequate progress.

In our view, missing the mark by less than 1 percent is hardly a disaster.

Overall, with all students tallied, BHS easily surpassed the math standard with 67.9 percent of students rated as proficient.

The situation is similar at South Baker. There, students with disabilities were 9.5 percent short of reaching the 60-percent minimum for reading proficiency.

Overall, though, 84.8 percent of South Baker students were rated as proficient in reading.

The value in these "failures" is that the statistics show school officials which group of students is struggling and could benefit from more attention.

Fortunately, the Baker District is striving to help those students — and others — with programs such as Response to Intervention, which gives elementary students extra help with reading.

District officials announced this week that they will expand the program this school year to include Grades 4-6.

If No Child Left Behind has no other legacy besides campaigns such as Response to Intervention, then the law will have succeeded.