The Maine Learning Results still hold promise, but commitment remains haphazard.

Good education is a right all Americans take for granted. The strides this country pioneered in universal public education have served us well.

By World War II, we were the best in the world at making K-12 education nearly universal. Following World War II, the GI Bill opened up college for all those men and women who had served, making what had been elite now available to those without particular money or privilege.

Once again, America led the way in raising education levels and offering up opportunity – lots of opportunity.

My father, a Canadian immigrant who had barely finished high school, took advantage of the GI Bill to go to a two-year business college. With a young family, he didn't feel he could do more, but he made it clear to his four children that we were all expected to get full college degrees. And we did.

This American dream was central to my generation. In fact, each generation of Americans from the founding of the Republic has been better educated than its predecessors – until now.

The generation of college age is our first to be less well-educated than its predecessors. With college costs escalating to unheard-of heights and motivation dimmed by an entitlement mentality, college graduation rates for public institutions have fallen below 50 percent and are closer to 40 percent for males.

Will future generations look back on the '60s and '70s as the high-water mark of U.S. education? This seems preposterous, given all of the well-documented trends toward a knowledge economy.

That is, toward a system in which one's value is increasingly determined by the level and depth of education and by one's ability to continue to grow and adapt.

Here in Maine, our educational system's performance mirrors the disappointing national situation. Whereas 20 years ago Maine's 4th- and 8th-grade students led the nation in reading and math assessment, we are now firmly in the middle of a mediocre pack.

The state developed a set of challenging education standards, Maine's Learning Results, in 1997, but according to the latest statewide assessments (the 2008 MEA assessments given in grades 3-8), 42 percent of Maine's students do not meet the standards in math and 33 percent do not meet the standards in reading.

When the Learning Results passed the Legislature in 1997, lawmakers stipulated that Maine students would need to meet or exceed the standards in each subject area by 2008 to graduate from high school.

Given the test results above, 30 percent to 40 percent of Maine's high school seniors might not be graduating this year – which may explain why the Legislature placed a "moratorium" on Learning Results in the last session, suspending the timetable for graduation requirements until yet another task force weighs in on the subject.

This group is called the Diploma Stakeholders Group. It represents the third effort of the current administration to come up with a solution to the question of how to get to a high school diploma based on Learning Results.

They are a good and dutiful group of educators and citizens meant to reflect all constituencies and stakeholders.

They are about to make their final recommendations to the commissioner of education. Like the groups that have come before them, they have labored mightily and come up with surprisingly little.

To their credit, they agreed on a good set of basic principles – one diploma, with several paths to get there and multiple approaches to assessment.

The problem is that they have once again dodged the critical issue of exactly how these assessments are to be done.

Should we care about this? If there were indications that Maine students were actually mastering Learning Results, I would say let the assessment debate continue. However, this is not the case.

We are simply "muddling along." A few systems have made good progress, mostly those in affluent ZIP codes, as Peter Geiger, the chair of the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education, aptly stated in his Maine Sunday Telegram column of Nov. 23 ("Let's keep our eyes on the prize").

However, the majority of Maine's K-12 students are not likely to be well-prepared – either for further education or today's work force.

Why do we Mainers seem willing to accept a verdict of such mediocrity for our children? Where is the outrage?

It is not a question of money. It is a question of will.

More next week on what can be done.