By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Kara is in ninth grade, and she's failing math. This is not new for Kara. She failed math last year, too.

She started eighth grade getting top marks on her homework and acing tests, but then, stuff happened at home. Family stuff. Confusing stuff. When Kara got back to school, she had missed enough of the math class to fall behind. As so often happens in math class, once you get behind, you only get more and more lost.

Don't worry, Kara's teacher told her. You'll still pass into the ninth grade. Just take math during the summer. In a correspondence course.

Translation: I don't have the time, energy or inclination to do what it takes to teach you, so you have to go off on your own and try to learn it yourself. Tough love? No, tough luck.

It's one thing to expect a fully functioning adult to direct their own learning, but for a child struggling with school, burdened with trouble at home, not to mention all the trauma and angst of just being 13, it was the beginning of the end. She went from promising student to a failure in less than one year.

All this talk of education reform, weighted student formulas, local elected school boards and dismantling the DOE bureaucracy threatens to lose sight of the target.

The target is kids like this girl and all the others who truly get left behind.

They get left behind when their teachers become overwhelmed and overburdened. They get left behind when their parents get wrapped up in their own troubles. They get left behind when everyone around them gives up on them, and they in turn give up on themselves.

Gov. Lingle brought up the beef over the date of Lahainaluna's graduation ceremony in her State of the State speech. The heart of the matter shouldn't be whether schools get the autonomy to pick the date of their graduation, but rather, how prepared are the students who are graduating and what is being done to help those who fell by the wayside long ago.

Elected local school boards? This is going to fix things? It's a big jump from decentralizing the Department of Education to making sure lost kids like Kara find their way again. Sure, kids get lost in a "system," but it always comes down to one iron-willed person, one teacher or parent or mentor, who can get them back on their feet and running.

True education reform will hold everyone accountable, principals, teachers, policy makers. It will be born of a philosophy that sees children as whole people with myriad problems and complications. And true reform will only come when politicians stop trying to take credit, because right now, they're all saying "children first" but referring to each other's proposals as "the governor's package" or "the Democratic Party's plan."

Maybe they need a correspondence course in diplomacy.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.