EDITORIAL A LONG WAY TO GO SMALL TEST-SCORE GAINS INCH LAUSD CLOSER, BUT HURDLES REMAIN.

AS one of the most dynamic and vibrant cities on the planet, Los Angeles should have a school system to match. As standardized test scores and federal performance results released this week show, it does not come close.

As the No Child Left Behind Act has taken effect, the Los Angeles Unified School District has shown steady progress in the proficiency of its students in English and math. But there are growing signs that improvement is getting harder to come by, with losses this year in areas such as graduation rates and the continued poor performance of middle schools.

The LAUSD continues to lag behind the state average, so there's still a lot of work to do until the nation's second-largest school district achieves Superintendent Roy Romer's goal of becoming one of the top big-city school systems in the country by 2010.

True, Los Angeles schools face challenges that others don't, such as twice as many students living in poverty and a large immigrant population. But that only means we need to speed up the pace of reform and boldly tackle the problems of teacher and administrator accountability and student achievement.