According to many of our elected federal leaders, in the year 2014 the United States will witness a miracle. At that time, 6 years from now, all children in this country enrolled in grades K through 12 will be absolutely “proficient” at reading. How can this be? Because, our federal education legislation has dictated it. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal education policy, all public schools are required to ensure that all children enrolled in their schools meet this standard (without much thought to the required resources, of course). Wiping out social, economic and political realities in one legislative stroke, leaders in Washington—the President, various Secretaries of Education, Senators and Representatives--must imagine themselves filled with supreme powers to alter reality with mere scratches of pens and Congressional votes.

Of course this destructively naïve, or perhaps more accurately, cleverly disguised, policy requirement is an impossibility, acknowledge by most, not all, yet still insisted upon. Such insistence can only inflame our cynicism and make us wonder at the true goals of these policy makers, as this situation seems most geared towards grinding down our public education system, a task that they are failing at, by the way.

Because any sensible person would want all children to be more than proficient at reading, anyone who questions this goal can be immediately labeled as having low-expectations or being tied to old ways. Such a stand ignores the calls that NCLB critics have made for a real infusion of resources, attention and policy prioritization that would allow for the expansion of educational programs and the setting of meaningful, rigorous academic goals. This alternative is in stark contrast to the mish-mash of strong and weak standards across the country, reflecting the geography of political favoritism.

Knowledge and news of the ways in which NCLB has at its core really no standards for the education of our nation’s children has been readily available since the exposure of the “Texas Miracle” as an exercise in data manipulation using such strategies as recoding records to make it look like kids did not drop-out of high school and retaining kids in lower grades to boost scores. These tactics, it should be noted, have disproportionately affected minority students.

Other exposes have shown how states are given favors to use ridiculously simple tests and to play statistical games in order to present themselves as helping students achieve great accomplishments. Now, just over the past few weeks, a fiasco in Georgia has once again illuminated the serious problems in over-relying on standardized tests, single measures of performance, and substituting testing for teaching, something understood from the start by educators and experts in assessment and evaluation.

Preliminary test results indicate that an astonishing 70 to 80 percent of middle school students did not pass this year’s social studies exam. The results are so outrageous, that Georgia’s Superintendent of schools is throwing out the results. While there is no definitive smoking gun, the problem seems related to a mismatch in a rapid change in the test without sufficient time or notification of teachers, and perhaps without a related change in curriculum.

The details are fuzzy, but the overall picture is clear. Testing is just one piece of the puzzle, good tests are hard to develop and must be clearly associated with teaching and classroom practices, and no one test is sufficient to determine what students known and can do.

On the ground participants in the public education system—students, teachers, parents and administrators—have no choice in the midst of such insanity but to focus on the day-to-day project of participating in and providing sound educational experiences, and to attempt to shield these spaces from the surrounding storm. Successes can be reported in this regard, as we seen in our own district in San Francisco (SFUSD), where more schools are finding unique and multi-faceted ways to serve the needs of student population diverse along numerous dimensions.

But it does get wearying to always be in a reactive and defensive mode, especially over something like public education that so obviously serves the common good. Looking ahead to the future, it is not clear if November will bring much change, as the state of the economy has trumped most other topics in the campaign dialog. Of the three presidential contenders of the moment, John McCain, unsurprisingly, has the weakest platform of all, an essentially non-existent one. So if the winds blow to the right on November 4th, public education supporters will be continuing this uphill climb.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each have much more specific proposals, much of which sound appealing (though the thought that Obama might be supporting vouchers is unnerving). While Obama’s is more fleshed out, there doesn’t appear to be much that either would disagree with. Both seem to be describing a much more constructively engaged federal government, focused on solutions as opposed to punitive measures.

Clinton’s platform stands out a bit in the identification of the need to fully fund IDEA, the federal special education program. Obama’s platform is unique in that it focuses on the needs of students, mentioning the need for a more meaningful assessment approach, but also highlights recruiting, retaining and developing teachers. Both candidates posit the need to fully fund NCLB, a thought that is quite frightening if it were funded in advance of a near complete overhaul.

2014 will certainly not bring any miracles. If these cynically established performance goals of NCLB are maintained, we can be sure that any purported successes will quickly be uncovered as nothing more than flashy data manipulation that are intended to mask the real challenges in education that NCLB does so little to address.

But then again if we do have a change in national leadership, there is some hope that NCLB could be radically transformed into legislation that actually supported educating kids. In such a new environment today’s phenomenal levels of community commitment to education could be channeled into building wonders, as opposed to protecting essentials. Not miracles, for sure, but something even better--the real results for which we work so hard.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.