Our kids won’t be back in school for several weeks, but already changes are visible, especially those related to the political climate in our country. Some of these changes will affect them directly, while others will have a more subtle impact on their classrooms and teachers.

One of the most visible of the &uot;political&uot; changes was in the news last week, when the state of Minnesota released the list of public schools that haven’t met the state’s expectations. It’s called the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report, an element of the new &uot;accountability&uot; forced on schools by &uot;No Child Left Behind.&uot; It covers how schools are meeting the proficiency standards created by the state. Are students learning enough of the right kind of things? Are they making progress towards passing the required tests?

The data for the report come from test scores, of course, and if even a few students aren’t proficient in certain subjects, or aren’t making measurable progress toward proficiency, the school gets in trouble.

Are schools having difficulty meeting every child’s needs? Yes, they are; they always have. Can we do better? Again the answer is yes. Here in Minnesota we’re doing a really good job teaching students from middle class families that have a northern European heritage. Poor students from other ethnic groups, especially African and Hispanic children, aren’t doing so well in our schools. We need to do a better job.

Unfortunately the benefits to students and schools from the &uot;accountability&uot; movement are still theoretical. The legislation’s inflexibility and reliance on competition will have practical consequences that look more like this: &uot;No Child Left Behind&uot; will mean no student left untested and could mean no school left unpunished.

Yes, I’ve heard the propaganda that &uot;accountability&uot; in education isn’t about forcing students to take more tests, but about helping schools do a better job. However, if even a few students don’t pass the test, a school will be required to inform every family that they’ve been found wanting by the state. If they don’t meet the state’s standards a second time, they will need to spend money to send their students elsewhere instead of strengthening their own programs. You don’t have to read much of the fine print to see the real message.

The focus of the new laws is the schools, but that focus reveals a potential weakness: It lets parents and communities off the hook. The primary teachers for every child are the adults among whom they live. The first three years of life are more important to success in school than all the years we spend in classrooms. Children will show up in school with an ability to learn molded by their caregivers. If they spent their first years of life strapped to a car seat, watching TV, with no regular meals or bedtimes, even the best teacher will have only a limited influence. It’s not fair to punish schools because of poor parenting.

For me there is also this to think about: Reforms based on &uot;accountability&uot; and &uot;creating choice&uot; for parents are based on an ideology that is hostile to public education. The current leadership of the Republican Party is not committed to public schools &045; they believe in vouchers for private schools and that religious schools do a better job than public ones (or at least that’s what the current secretary of education says). The very choice of word to describe these reforms &045; accountability &045; carries with it the idea of the money that’s being spent, which is the real thing that certain Republicans care about when it comes to schools. Blindly embracing the &uot;free enterprise&uot; system for public education, forcing schools into a &uot;marketplace&uot; mentality, will mean undermining the ways that public schools, families and communities depend on each other.

What aspects of the marketplace are schools supposed to emulate anyway? Are they supposed to start letting their managers get all kinds of bonuses while the employees are laid off or take wage cuts? Are schools supposed to move their operations overseas, where teachers work for less? Are they supposed to spend lots of money on slick marketing campaigns, like private businesses do?

With the government cutting funding for the kinds of programs that help the students that struggle, and with schools facing more tests and mandates (that have yet to be funded), &uot;No Child left Behind&uot; looks like an assault on public education, not an attempt to reform it.

David Rask Behling is a rural Albert Lea resident. His column appears Tuesdays.