Topeka ? State Board of Education members aired frustrations Wednesday about the federal No Child Left Behind law to a congressman who said he wants improve the 2-year-old education reforms.

Some board members agreed with Rep. Dennis Moore, a Democrat who represents the 3rd District, that the law is unrealistic in requiring schools to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014. Others said Kansas was penalized because it had high standards a decade before the federal law took effect.

Moore said he believed Congress was not providing states as much money as originally promised. He is among the dozens of members of the Congress sponsoring legislation to suspend the law’s requirements until funding increases.

Moore said he supported the law when it was enacted because he believed its goals were laudable — and because he believed Congress would follow through with money. He asked board members to give him a specific list of suggestions for changes.

“If we’re going to have a law, it needs to be part of the real world,” Moore said. “I don’t think in the real world, we can expect this law is going to be — or should be — repealed in the near future, but I think what we can do is to try to make up for the deficiencies we’re able to identify.”

The board invited members of the state’s congressional delegation to speak about educational issues, and Moore was the first who had time in his schedule.

He met with the board a day after its members learned six districts and 15 schools failed during the last school year to meet state goals for making academic progress. They were Title I institutions, those that receive federal funds targeted to schools with large concentrations of poor students.

The state expects to release another list, for non-Title I schools, in October. Schools and districts that do not meet goals for academic progress must give parents the option of transferring students to another school, and sanctions increase each subsequent year the goals are missed. They include forcing schools to restructure their curriculum.

Republican board members were most critical of the law — Sue Gamble, of Shawnee; Steve Abrams, of Arkansas City, and Connie Morris, of St. Francis.

Abrams and Gamble said the federal law ought to recognize that Kansas already had high standards in place.

“I don’t think we need the same type of scrutiny as a Florida, as a Texas, as a Mississippi, as an Alabama, or an urban area in New York or Pennsylvania,” Gamble said.

Morris, who supports President Bush, the law’s champion, said such policy should be left to state and local governments.

“I just think No Child Left Behind missed it on the boat of states’ rights,” Morris said.

Board member Bill Wagnon, a Topeka Democrat, chided Moore for suggesting that some children — the profoundly disabled, for example — won’t ever catch up to their peers.

“We have expectations for every child,” Wagnon said. “This notion of putting these qualifiers on it only allows the people who don’t want to fund education adequately to escape responsibility for it.”