State Sen. John Vratil, R-Leawood, made an interesting prediction last week when he and Atty. Gen. Phill Kline were talking to the Kansas State Board of Education about education standards.

Vratil and Kline were urging the state board to eliminate a standard that will require all Kansas students to be at grade level proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The standard, instituted in response to the federal No Child Left Behind law, is impossible to achieve, they said, and only sets the state up for failure and perhaps some lawsuits from parents or students.

In making his case Vratil dismissed the standards of No Child Left Behind as unrealistic and said the law “will implode and go away” when states find it impossible to comply with its provisions.

Many educators would consider the departure of NCLB a blessing. It’s not that they don’t agree with the ideal of educating every child; no competent teacher would intentionally leave any child “behind.” But education officials – at least at the state level – have pretty much recognized all along that bringing 100 percent of children up to grade level standards is statistically impossible.

Vratil has more than a statewide perspective on this issue, having served on a national legislative task force that looked at the effects of No Child Left Behind. The group saw the goals of the program as laudable but unrealistic. The task force also argued that the law is especially unfair to states like Kansas that already were instituting academic reforms. The lower a state’s academic standards are, the easier it obviously will be to achieve something close to 100 percent compliance.

According to Sue Gamble, a state school board member, the 100 percent standard set by the state was more of a defensive measure than an achievable goal. “Our point,” she told the Associated Press, “is that if we are making a good faith effort to reach the standard, then we will be in the best possible position to negotiate with the feds when we don’t – because we know statistically, we can’t.”

The federal standards have the state in a bind. Many Kansas teachers also acknowledge that as schools concentrate on reaching math and reading goals, other subjects often get “left behind.” Because subjects like science and social studies aren’t part of the federal standards, they often get short shrift in elementary school classrooms. The price we may be paying for meeting math and reading standards is a generation of children who are lacking a well-rounded education.

Kansas isn’t the only state worried about this trend. Other states are pushing back at both the educational standards and the costs of meeting the federal mandates. Perhaps, as Vratil said, the No Child Left Behind law “will implode and go away” or at least federal officials will be forced to rethink the inequities and fallacies that apparently are part of the law.