Happiness in college was getting your hands on an old test your professor gave a previous class. Disaster was discovering too late that the professor had several different tests used to cover the same material.

Many school systems are so caught up in teaching the tests that children don't get a quality education. But their test scores are good, so people are happy.

The challenge for a quality school system is to teach the tests and more, while providing students with an education and not just scores that will match up with those in any school system in the nation.

That's Decatur City Schools' goal as it commits to making sure students know the material given on the Stanford Achievement Test, while continuing its reading and math initiatives, it's Advanced Placement program and the second year of its International Baccalaureate degree program.

Superintendent Sam Houston didn't come out and say the city will teach the test, but he asked teachers to intensify their efforts to improve SAT-10 scores.

That means teachers will have the benefit of past material, if not old exams, as guides to preparing students for the test. That is a way of learning core information.

In stressing SAT-10 scores, the schools still must remain accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind program, which is a confusing series of goals and measurements that apply to individual schools.

SAT-10 is a tool used to measure a school system's performance against the rest of the nation. Decatur felt the sting of having SAT-10 scores fall below the state's average for 2006-07. The state average percentile was 53.9, while Decatur's was 50.5.

Hopefully, this commitment will silence school critics and they will take leadership roles in finding the resources to carry out the goal.

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