Another school year is upon us, and I recall with nostalgia and yearning those last, lazy days of summer when I waited eagerly for school to begin, first as a student, and much later, as an educator.

Those days are gone. The reason I am less thrilled than usual to be returning to school this year is the certain knowledge that, once again, teachers and principals will be berated for failing to do the impossible. We have been told that we must eliminate the achievement gap. The sad truth is that no matter how hard we try, we can't. The appalling thing is that almost everyone knows we can't, but refuses to acknowledge it because it is inconvenient to do so.

It is the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that is the driving force in holding schools accountable for eliminating the achievement gap, and it comes up for reauthorization this November, so I will speak primarily to the fallacies inherent in that law and Hawai'i's implementation of it.

At the high school level in particular, homework and studying outside of school are necessary if a student is to be successful. But as long as a student can choose to do homework or not, as long as a student can decide to study or not, they can choose to be successful or not. Of course students don't look at it that way; they look at is as a choice between homework and sports, video games, getting together with friends, etc. It is here that parents and guardians have to help students make the right choices.

Indeed, pressures at home often exacerbate the problem. It is disparate socio-economic levels that create and maintain the achievement gap, and holding teachers and principals responsible for eliminating it is both unfair and futile.

There is another way to close the achievement gap, although it's not one I endorse. If students can't or won't do homework, don't assign any. It is an unfortunate fact that if you can't close the gap by raising the bottom, you can still do so by lowering the top. Watch out.

At all too many schools, especially elementary schools serving low-income and disadvantaged communities, the focus on English and math to the near exclusion of other subjects in order to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) has led to drastic reductions in what children learn about geography, science and art.

It is this trend, along with a desire by parents to see their children surrounded by peers whose parents share their commitment to education, that is pushing many parents to put their children in private schools. It's not that these parents think that private school teachers are better or that the public facilities are inadequate. Rather, it's that the system's unrealistic attempts to close the achievement gap are actually making what public schools offer less unacceptable.

If you look at the results of last spring's Hawai'i State Assessment (HSA) given to public school students (Honolulu Advertiser, July 20), you will see that despite score improvements, almost none of our public high schools are in good standing, and that, in fact, most are planning for restructuring. The impact of socio-economic status and student choice has already been discussed, but there are two more issues at work here you should also be aware of.

The first is that the HSA is a low-stakes test for the students. It has no impact on grades, class standing, graduation, or what college or university the student might get into. As a result, most high school students don't care how they do on the HSA. For many high school students taking the HSA, the question is not "How well can I do?" but "How fast can I get done?"

The other reason so many high schools seem to be doing so poorly is more technical, and related to when a particular subgroup of students must be counted toward AYP. For most elementary schools, there are only a few subgroups that need to be considered, since a subgroup of less than 40 students is not considered statistically meaningful.

As the size of the school grows from elementary school to middle school to high school, those numbers become big enough to matter. This is particularly true for the special education subgroup, but may apply to other subgroups as well. A subgroup may not be doing any differently in high school than they did before, it's just that for the first time there are enough students in the high school to be analyzed separately.

Our governor and our superintendent are smart, caring, and committed to Hawai'i's children. So how can our educational policies be so out of touch with reality? I wish I knew.

Education leaders need to get off their political high horses and work together to make public education in Hawai'i responsive to all of our children, recognizing that children don't all have the same interests or abilities or needs. We have to start by acknowledging an inconvenient truth: Schools alone can't eliminate the achievement gap, and shouldn't be labeled as failing or in need of restructuring because they haven't done so.

Then perhaps we can move on to education goals and policies that actually make sense.

Russell Robison is a teacher at Mililani High School and is involved with educational issues in Hawai'i. Opinions expressed here are his own. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.