Leaving no child behind.

Byline: The Register-Guard

High school graduation time brings welcome relief from the steady diet of gloom-and-doom stories about education in America.

How can schools in Oregon and elsewhere in the country be failing if they continue to produce these remarkable young people, so accomplished and full of promise? For a few weeks in June, it becomes easy to believe that the country's future is in good hands.

These graduates are the products of a school system that explicitly aims to educate everyone - not just the brightest and the most talented, not just the wealthy and the culturally advantaged, but every single child. If a child has a learning disability or needs extra help in the in classroom, the schools are legally required to provide it. If a child shows little interest in classwork and comes from a family that doesn't value education, the schools are required to make a sustained effort to teach that child anyway.

The United States is not unique in this respect, but many other nations - including most of those where students routinely outscore American kids on standardized tests - focus their educational resources on children who show early potential for high achievement.

Superficially, this seems a rational way to allocate public funds. The students with the greatest capacity for academic success can be identified after just a few years in school, and providing them with a rich educational diet nourishes the next generation of economic, cultural and political leaders. Less effort and money can be spent on those who show less potential and are destined to make up their societies' middle and lower ranks.

The American education system incorporates those meritocratic practices, but not until later - primarily at the university level and in the workplace. The brightest students (and, as is the case even in strict meritocracies, those with good connections) get into the best colleges and land the best jobs.

This helps account for the fact that while American public schools fare poorly in global comparisons, American universities are the best in the world, and American companies are leaders in innovation. Even in the past 10 years, with global challenges rising in every discipline, Americans have won more than half of the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine.

This suggests that the American educational system is not hurting the nation's competitive position by investing in the education of all its children in kindergarten through high school, and even devoting a disproportionate share of resources to those students who are hardest to teach. The United States' commitment, expressed in the title of the Leave No Child Behind Act, doesn't water down the educational soup.

Indeed, a refusal to close the door on the potential of any child should be recognized as a winning strategy. Some children's potential can't be spotted until after it has been given a chance to develop. Early identification of children as undeserving of an educational investment can prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Through its profoundly democratic decision to provide educational advantages to all children, the United States has resolved to make the most of its human resources.

Scanning the faces and names of this year's graduates, it's plain that many of them have the brains, character and family support that would have allowed them to succeed under any educational system. But then there are always more than a few surprises - the graduates who overcame great adversity, the ones who blossomed late, the kids who could easily have been written off early on. The refusal to give up on any child is among the nation's most noble commitments, and graduation time reinforces the faith that the investment will be repaid manyfold.