Children from racial or ethnic minority groups and those who don't speak English well, who have a disability or come from poor families have too often been, in effect, that stereotypical child in Utah's public schools.
When they performed poorly in Utah's overcrowded classes, teachers who were struggling with 30 or 35 students in each class didn't have the time or resources to do much about it.
The traditional ways of reporting test scores, with all children's results lumped together into an average, allowed too many of these children to simply slip through the cracks and usually out of school before they graduated.
The strength of the federal No Child Left Behind law has been to make teachers and schools accountable for all students, including those minority students who lag far behind their white peers, particularly in Utah.
Utah's achievement test, U-PASS, doesn't zero in on failing groups of students the way NCLB does.
Overburdened and underpaid teachers have their hands full already. That may be why Utah schools are not consistently narrowing the achievement gap.
In test results just reported, 85 percent of white students made "adequate yearly progress" in math, but only 77 percent of Latino students and 66 percent of African American students did. However, those groups made adequate progress in greater numbers this year than last - barely. Smaller percentages of disabled and disadvantaged students made adequate progress this year than last.
The attention paid to test scores and the effort to help students in various ethnic and racial groups make adequate annual progress as required by the federal law has forced some changes that should be beneficial to these students.
But simply paying closer attention can't make a huge difference without a bigger financial commitment from the Utah Legislature. Tutors, remedial classes and other programs that can help minority children, such as all-day kindergarten, don't come cheap.
It's important that not just schools but legislators, too, be held accountable for these students whose failures are too easy to ignore.
