It was good to have U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visit one of our South Carolina schools last week. In her visit to Columbia High School, her focus was on the graduation rates among high schools across the nation.

A strong nation needs many learned minds. Quality schools provide the mechanics for this result. The quality of school systems can be best determined by how well they tap the interest and potential of the vast majority of their students and graduate them on time.

Their plans, however, must be systemic and executed on purpose, involving as many partners from the students' family and from the community as possible. How productive those students become as industrious and intelligent members of the larger society is contingent upon how industrious schools, families (or representatives) and communities have been at tapping such interest and potential.

Quality schools are the lifeblood of local, state, national and international economic systems. The No Child Left Behind educational objective rose from that idea. The original intention of the legislation, I honestly believe, was noble. It was meant to raise the level of academic achievement of all the nation's children.

While much is broken in the way No Child Left Behind legislation is administered by the U.S. Department of Education, the undergirding premise should be preserved when the law undergoes greatly needed reconstruction or replacement. We must continue to hold all of our students to high academic standards in any education legislation that is crafted.

To square up No Child Left Behind regulations (especially the uneven measure that determines whether a school has met adequate yearly progress), I recommend amending the formula by including a National Assessment of Educational Progress factor.

National Assessment of Educational Progress is a test administered annually by the U.S. Department of Education. It measures academic progress against fairly high standards. If South Carolina compares well against National Assessment of Educational Progress standards but fails to meet No Child Left Behind, it should be labeled against the more reliable, nationally consistent measure -- NAEP.

A number of states measure poorly against NAEP standards but easily meet No Child Left Behind standards because their state-defined No Child Left Behind academic measures are low. Further study would be required to determine the application of this approach at the district and school level.

There are empirical standards that must be satisfied for this approach to be statistically sound.

If the U.S. Department of Education refuses to make the playing field even for all 50 states, it should consider some factor to square up comparisons among them. Uneven comparisons and their false sense of failure can collide with economic development and the need to bring industry into our state and communities.

Given the current economy, we need not issue misleading reports on the status of education, the economy engine of our state.

REACH FRANK ROBERSON, A COLUMNIST AND EDUCATOR, AT FRANKROBERSON@ROBERSONLLC.COM.