This week's news about Oregon schools under No Child Left Behind sounded dismal. But once again, the public cannot tell if the news meant anything.

Under the federal mandate, schools are supposed to make sure that all their students - all of them - can read and do math at grade level and meet state standards by 2014. Toward that goal, Oregon started with low standards and raised them year by year. This year, 60 percent of students had to meet state standards in English and language arts in order to make adequate yearly progress. And for math, the target was 59 percent.

Last year the targets were 10 points lower. So, with the hurdles raised sharply, it's not surprising that the results sounded disappointing.

But if a school failed to make adequate yearly progress, that's no indication of anything other than that an artificial target was missed. The majority of a school's pupils may be regular Einsteins in math, all being taught by master teachers and dashing off equations right and left, but if a special-ed class falls short, the school is labeled as having failed.

Let us remember that the goal is utopian and cannot be met, no matter how long or hard anybody tries.

No child left behind? Well, somebody who is slow is going to be left behind sooner or later. So is somebody who is lazy or who would rather spend time on MySpace than do homework.

So unless human nature among school students is miraculously transformed by federal legislation, whole bunches of people are always going to be left behind.

Schools are obligated to try to bring everybody along, but it's not within the control of schools to bring this about. All they can do is try.

Even if the goal was achievable, the state and federal reports on this subject do not tell the public what it wants to know. To say that a percentage has met the standards without saying what the standards are does not reveal anything about what anybody knows.

Considering the effort that goes into the annual reporting of mysterious numbers, you would think that coming up with a more informative report would be Job One. (hh)