Bangor Daily News, Aug. 23
The federal education reform that is supposed to clarify whether schools are performing well offers so many interesting ways for good schools to fail that states will spend the next several years trying to explain why in the muddled matrix of test scores, graduation and participation rates so many schools are considered failures. Maine has anticipated this, but it has the additional job of informing federal regulators which of their rules don’t work very well.

No Child Left Behind sounds simple: Either a school makes adequate progress in reading and math, or after two consecutive years of a lack of progress, parents are told they can move their children elsewhere. Parents should know, however, that they could only move to another public school within their own district, which in Maine’s case for high schools is a problem – only Portland’s district has more than one public high school.

But that’s the easy part. The complication is this: For now, seven subcategories of students in three grades (four, eight and 11) will be tested in two subjects and be held to standards for participation, attendance and graduation rates. Following this, grades three, five, six and seven will be added, and in ’06, science progress will also count. The Maine Education Department figures each school has 441 possible ways to fail and that it is inevitable that almost all of them will eventually.

“Fail” isn’t a word the U.S. Department of Education wants to use – schools that don’t meet standards under NCLB are called priority schools, although how a large majority can also be a priority would strain the reading comprehension portion of the test.

Maine is expected to release its first set of test results in a couple weeks and expects considerably more schools to fall into the priority category than have so far. Other states have completed their scoring and are not encouraged. In Florida, 87 percent of schools failed; in California, 45 percent failed.

The challenge for Maine under what ought to be called No Calculation Left Behind is how to explain that a school that has consecutive failures in participation for a subgroup of students should not be in the same category as a school with numerous failures in reading and math in multiple grades. One tempting way this can be made readily understandable is if the public is told to ignore the results until further failure results in a draconian penalty. …

[The state] has more to do, such as persuading the federal government to re-examine how it evaluates the scores of each subgroup and whether the failure of a single one of the 441 standards ought to result in priority listing. It should take into account student mobility. … And it should protect school curriculum that is not directly measured by the tests. …

So much work and, still, so many ways to fail.


Common responsibility


Madison (S.D.) Daily Leader, Aug. 26
New computer viruses are attacking computers everywhere. Not surprisingly, the recent wave of viruses causes some people to call for new laws, putting stiffer penalties on those who hack for profit or amusement.

But passing new laws or stiffer penalties won’t help. No, the path to defeating hackers is nontraditional. Hackers are smart, unethical people. They can only be defeated by smart, ethical people, which outnumber hackers by a huge number. …

Our responsibility as computer users is to take advantage of the defenses available. Since unprotected computers are not only hacked but also used to hack others, we have a responsibility to our common sharing of information over the Internet to stop hackers.


Separate church, state


The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, Aug. 26
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore needs a lesson. Not a Bible lesson. He seems to have gotten that one down, particularly as it relates to the Ten Commandments. Moore needs a lesson in the separation of church and state.

His eight associate justices last week overruled Moore, and ordered that he obey a federal court order to remove the 5,300-pound granite marker that he put in the rotunda of the state judicial building. Moore, who contends he is bound to obey God’s law when he decides it goes against secular law, was suspended last week by a state judicial ethics commission for disobeying the order by U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson to move the monument. …

This dispute should have been settled nine months ago, when Thompson ordered the removal of the monument. Moore is trampling on two bedrock principles of the American experience: The rule of law and the separation of church and state. …


Keep dialogue open


Aftenposten, Oslo, Norway, Aug. 27
So far, no one has taken responsibility for the terror action in the Indian city of Bombay in which about 50 people lost their lives and 150 were seriously injured. It can therefore only be pure speculation about who was behind it, even though India authorities already pointed to a militant Islamic organization in Pakistan. …

Pakistan was quick to condemn the Bombay bomb, which was aimed at innocent civilians. At first, India accepted the condemnation. But … Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, known as a hawk in foreign policy, said Pakistan’s declaration would not be credible unless the country turns over 19 people that India wants for terrorism.

It is hard to say whether that statement signals a harder Indian line that could torpedo the difficult peace process Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee put his prestige behind. … If that dialogue breaks down, the consequences will be great.