Today's paper contains news that undoubtedly will upset families who have children in some two-thirds of the public schools in the state.

Their schools have failed to hit the mark, determined by state standards and federal law, of "adequate yearly progress" toward certain educational goals.

Like it or not, this translates into a conclusion that these schools are "failing" to do what is expected of them. By any measurement, that is an unhealthy and off-center view of what is actually happening.

What the results actually tell us is that these schools have failed to meet, often in small or ironically irrelevant ways, high-standards goals.

So, the numbers place a laser spotlight on those areas and those schools where improvement and extra help is needed.

The issue is not setting high standards and then measuring where and how we have met those standards. Rather, the issue is what happens next.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, the federal statute that drives this high-stakes testing and measuring, a series of fairly fixed sanctions and actions follow when a school misses its goals.

The ultimate sanction is takeover by the state or by another entity. As we have already seen, this "takeover" process can involve bringing in private companies as consultants.

Nothing wrong with that on the surface. But it can, and some fear will, lead to privatization of public schools and/or a voucher system that will allow parents to escape public schools altogether.

Imagine the social consequences of that: Our public schools will be left to educate the least successful and often least-motivated among our young while the rest will have fled.

That is not No Child Left Behind. That is abandonment.

The fixes are rather simple: