While diagnoses differ, there is general agreement that “No Child Left Behind” — the national effort to raise all students to proficiency in reading, writing and math — has been an abject failure. Waivers are now being given to states and the original goal has been declared “unrealistic.”

But is it so unrealistic to expect students to be able to read with comprehension, write a literate essay, and master basic arithmetic skills after 13 years of schooling?

One problem is that high standards have warred with the pressure to get politically acceptable percentages of students to “meet the standard,” touching off the infamous “race to the bottom.” All too often, standards of minimal competency become the standard product and function as a ceiling instead of a floor.

By allowing “test prep” to become the focus of instruction, we have committed the fatal blunder of conflating what we require of every student with what we expect of our best students.

At the same time, NCLB produced very little in the way of genuine reform. It was, for example, business-as-usual in the way we train, hire, retain and reward teachers, and surely the most glaring contrast between the U.S. and the top-performing countries is that they attract their best students into K-12 teaching and we do not.

Most grievous of all is the nation’s failure to educate the next generation in the vital areas of math and science. Nothing threatens the future viability of our economy or our national security more. It also poses a major obstacle to social mobility — another leading indicator of social health in which the U. S. now lags many other countries, even class-riven Britain.

Our college graduation rates, once the world’s highest, have also been overtaken by many other developed countries.

Some take comfort in the belief that our top students are still world class, but this, too, is no longer the case. Only four OECD countries — Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Mexico — produced a smaller percentage of students achieving at the advanced level in math on a recent international (PISA) test of eighth-graders.

Nor can one take solace in the superior performance of schools in our affluent suburbs. A recent study by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee (Education Next, Winter 2012) has shown that their students, too, are badly outperformed by students in many OECD countries, most with far lower per capita GDPs. The average math achievement of a student in Beverly Hills, they write, “is at the 53rd percentile (of) our international comparison group.”

Another problem, of course, was allowing each state to set its own standards, assessments and rate of progress toward the goal of universal proficiency. The wretched quality of the state standards produced should also teach us that standards are a double-edged sword that can do as much to lower aspirations as raise them; as much to dumb us down as to brighten us up.

The response has been to induce the states to adopt “voluntary” national standards — voluntary on pain of losing federal funding. This gives every appearance of doubling down on failure.

The national standards are — trust me — little better than the state standards that preceded them. The cost of producing new curricula and texts aligned with these standards will be astronomical.

For example, Massachusetts spent $100 billion on its standards and assessments and teacher training to lead its students to international competitiveness and is now asked to jettison its top-rated standards for weaker federal ones in return for a one-time $250 million federal grant. Once the assessments that go with the new standards are in place, the pressure to get acceptable percentages of students over the bar by lowering the bar will return.

In short, the latest five-year plan fails to address any of the serious flaws of the system. To quote a popular saying of Einstein’s: “To do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is not the mark of perseverance, but of insanity.”

I have offered the following simple alternative to this failed approach: make the NAEP exams in reading, writing and math — the acknowledged “gold standard” — our national assessments. That would give us the desired uniformity across state lines and serve as a workable, and adjustable, criterion of college and workplace readiness.

All the expense and negatives that attach to the national standards would be eliminated at a stroke.

Perhaps then we could get around to addressing the main shortcoming of our public school system: its failure to create a variety of coherent academic programs that engage all students who choose them and inspire them to learn up to their fullest potential.

Such programs must be made the focus of instruction if we are to advance. Then scoring “proficient” on the NAEPs would be a natural by-product of students’ immersion in such programs.

Roger Rosenkrantz of Readfield is a math Ph.D and retired college teacher who has been working on a K-12 math-science curriculum in recent years.