By Jeff Linn

The mayoral control proposal seems dead in the water, and its strongest advocate, Rochester Mayor Bob Duffy, has his eye on Albany. Three of the seven members of the Rochester School Board hope to leave it and run for the State Legislature. Meanwhile, this is an important time for the Rochester School District itself, with Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard's entering his fourth year with the district.

As schools around the region prepare to open for the new academic year, this week schools are the focus of two articles: our main feature, on Superintendent Brizard's tenure, and this guest commentary, by Rochester parent Jeff Linn, who is principal of a Canandaigua school. Linn's commentary replaces Mary Anna Towler's Urban Journal, which is taking a brief summer break this week.

Does learning count if it cannot be measured? Not in New York.

Now that the state has released the adjusted test scores for math and reading that show children in Rochester and across the state doing more poorly than last year, brace yourself for another round of attacks on the schools. School curriculums have already been narrowed to include more than half the day on math and reading. Now they will shrink even more as educators analyze the test results that shape our education policies. The outcome is predictable.

There will be less time for social studies, science, and other subjects in Grades 3 through 8 as teachers work to raise test scores. Our local press and business leaders will blame the teachers unions. School administrators will be asked to collect more data to explain the low scores and how to raise them. Advocates of school choice and for-profit chartering organizations will unleash a torrent of lobbyists and data "proving" that they can do it better.

As Meryl Tisch, chancellor of the State Board of Regents said in the July 29 New York Times: "These results will finally provide real unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability." Hail the two cornerstones of our modern education system: accountability and testing to achieve that accountability.

The newly released scores, no more real than ever, allow us to enter another era of lamenting our low test scores when we should be spending our energy designing a coherent curriculum based on national standards to engage today's students. The heart of American education has always been the curriculum: the stuff we teach and what we want kids to learn. The fallacy of President Bush's No Child Left Behind and President Obama's Race to the Top is the idea that testing and accountability are equal to effective curriculum and teaching.

Tests matter only if they are valid and do what they are supposed to do: measure student performances and inform teachers on what to instruct. But our state tests have always been a "shell game" and a political tool, rather than an educational one. From the beginning, NCLB narrowed its focus in the schools on reading and math and allowed states to set their own assessments and cut rates. It was testing for testing's sake.

Indeed the people who have benefited the most are the testing industry. For example, as reported on their website, CRT/McGraw Hill, which holds the contract for testing in New York, saw its stock price double from 2001 to 2008. State testing in New York is corporate welfare at its finest.

Now that the state has adjusted the passing rates on its tests, it is important to note that they were last adjusted in 2006. At that time, the "cut" scores were adjusted down. Some critics claim that was so New York City's Mayor Bloomberg could prove that test scores went up as the result of mayoral control.

In her latest book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, explained that prior to 2006 a student had to score a 41 percent on the English Language Arts assessments to get a 2 on a 4-point scale (1 being the lowest). But in 2006 they changed that to a 17.9 percent to achieve that same 2. The math cutoffs for a Level 2 score were also lowered, to 22 percent from 36 percent.

It appears that Commissioner Steiner and the Regents are, in their eyes, righting a wrong by ratcheting the cut scores back up four years later, albeit after other scores have already been reported to the district.

So here are some questions to ponder about the latest shell game. How meaningful are these tests if we can raise and lower them to fit our needs? How reliable and valid are the tests if we can just make up what a 2, 3, or 4 are? How did we get to the point where some 50 or so questions shape everything that we do as educators and all we believe about effective education?

And does any of it matter, especially in the lives of our most needy students, who in the words a state Education Department press release, "turn out to be much further behind than anyone recognized."

Even if the scores do mean something and are valid, a glance at the recut scores shows a familiar story. Districts with more middle-class people, higher tax bases, and less poverty score higher, and districts with more poverty score lower.

In districts like Pittsford, Brighton, and Penfield the recut scores go down 10 percent or 12 percent, but 85 percent or so of the students still make the cutoff. Indeed any school with fewer than 25 percent of students receiving free lunches (the accepted measure of poverty as it relates to schools) will achieve reasonable pass rates.

But schools with more than 50 percent poverty rate will fail, and the percentage of children failing will come close to the percentage of those who receive free and reduced lunch. So no matter how the state "cuts" it, the conditions that children live in still make a difference in their educational achievement.

Bandages don't help. There are not enough mentors or volunteers to help. Bludgeoning teachers and administers over the head with poor test scores and ill conceived tests do not help. Neither does blaming the families. This population of students needs a coherent and meaningful curriculum that connects to their lives. They also need services that do not stop at the end of the school day or an extended school day to help replace the social capital and middle-class values that many of them are missing.

Some schools can provide that, but they are few and far between, and no urban school district in United States has been able to offer systemic change that replicates the success of these few. Fifty years of research on the subject comes back to the same conclusion: children from low socioeconomic environments achieve in classes or schools where at least 60 percent of their peers are middle class.

Poor educational results are more indicative of the failure of our urban economics than the educational program itself. So even if we buy into the idea that the state got it right this time and the test scores mean something and that we want to raise them in Rochester, the only real answer is to get these kids in schools where students are not all poor. And the only answer to that problem is to think regionally.

Tweaking test scores means nothing. Neither do the well-intentioned letters or essays from business leaders and others advocating for mayoral control or singing the blues about city kids' underachievement, how the parents don't care, and how overpaid the teachers are.

If our critics want to help us open, our suburban school districts to the 27,000 Rochester students, 90 percent of whom receive free and reduced-price lunch, and provide them with the same opportunities that they have for your own kids. Anything else is just another shell game.

Rochesterian Jeff Linn is principal of a primary school in Canandaigua and was previously director of staff development for the Canandaigua School District. He has two children in the Rochester City School District.