No Data Left Behind.

When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The program doesn't work. It really does not get any simpler then that.

It is painfully obvious that NCLB was created by people from the outside of the education system looking in. All they could see was a vast forest but not one single tree.

Great schools that have been honored in previous years for achievement are suddenly being threatened with losing funding if they do not get their scores up.

Marginal students, who bring testing averages down, are being allowed to drop out without as many resources being used to retain them.

Teachers are spending an inordinate amount of time "teaching to the test", instead of truly educating their students.

Individuality is being sacrificed for conformity.

Anybody who has worked in education knows that there are gifted children who struggle with one or more subjects, as well as underachievers who shine in one subject above all others. It was the beauty of the American education system that these children were all valued. The "C" student was just as important as the "A" student.

But those days have passed. Today the bottom line is testing. High scores mean more money for your school and teachers, and low scores mean less money for your school and teachers. Schools are now encouraged to focus on students that can take a test.

But where does that leave the child who loves to learn but freezes up during a test? What about the child brimming over with creativity who doodles on the margins of the test leaving the boxes unfilled? Do we want to send those children the message that they cannot succeed?

And let's face it the real focus of the NCLB was to try and privatize education in this country. The program introduced the school voucher program which allowed parents who perceive that their school is not being successful at educating their offspring to take that child out of their home school and place them in a private school which is then paid for with taxes instead of out of the pockets of the parents.

What is wrong with that?

Well it may seem like nothing, until you realize that the harsh standards introduced by NCLB also came with chronic underfunding. Essentially many schools were set up to fail. Many schools that were previously considered successful by the way.

And then think about what most private schools feature that is missing from the public school environment. Religion. Many private schools feature a curriculum built around Christian principles. Conservatives have been trying for years to get religion into the public school system and failed every time. Until now.

So now the state is forced to pay a religious organization to proselytize to these new members while teaching math. So the main purpose, at least for the Republicans, was to promote their religion utilizing state and federal funds. Tricky isn't it?

The damage that this program will do in the long run is hard to calculate, but it is a safe bet that it will not make us more competitive in the world market in the decades to come. Mainly because it fails to recognize the true value of the American school system. And that is that it helps to foster the imagination and individuality of its student body.

In the immortal words of that great philosopher Willy Wonka "We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams."