TOP BELIEVING SLOGANS, especially the ones that come out of the White House. Twinkies aren't wholesome goodness, and "The Clear Skies Initiative" isn't really going to bring clear skies. And, it turns out, the "Leave No Child Behind" law actually leaves lots of children behind.

So many, they even have a name now, "Pushouts," as in "we're pushing you out of school so that our cumulative test scores will be higher."

Yes, that's what this is all about. Our "Leave No Child Behind" law is written like this: As a state, you get federal money for your schools, but only when you make two main things happen. Test scores must go up and dropout rates go down. How best to achieve both of those goals? By making the dumber kids disappear!

The "Texas Miracle" in education, it turns out, was all about raising test scores by making almost the entire bottom half of the class drop out, and then lowering the dropout rate by putting those dropouts in phony categories like "transferred" or "enrolled in GED" or "dating Kobe."

We weren't really improving the system, but we were improving it where it matters, on paper. It's not for nothing all these Texans looked up to Enron. For the 2000 election, Houston's dropout rate was given as 1.5 percent. It's been revised to 40 percent. Probably by the same guy who does the budget. I don't need a degree in fuzzy math to know that 40 percent is not no child left behind.

And if you say "no child" in your law, it takes a Texas-size nerve to then treat those kids like cards in a gin rummy hand, where you get to ditch the two low ones, and where bodies just disappear like dissidents in Argentina, or that Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom.

George W. Bush ran for office as the education guy and his caring about leaving no child behind is what softened him into a compassionate conservative.

So it seems wrong to find out that what we're doing is just handing lots of kids a GED kit and telling them, "Good luck exploring your other educational opportunities, like learning how many vials of crack you can carry in your underwear."

As no one could tell you better than our president himself, we don't all blossom early in life, so maybe writing off so many kids so early isn't so wise. It might amuse the president to know that this is exactly what they do in his favorite country, France, but France has more of a social safety net than we do. Oh, we have one. It's called prison.

People say education is the cornerstone of our democracy - they're wrong, of course - it's campaign cash, and lots of it. But shouldn't it still count for something? As the president himself might say, "We can do gooder."

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