This letter to the editor by Raymond Simon, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, appeared in the Baltimore Sun on March 10, 2007.

Give up. It can't be done. That is the message sent to Baltimore's children by the editorial "Another try" (March 1).

The editorial claimed that the problems of urban education are intractable, a result of poverty and the racial divide. The Sun says it is "unfair to raise expectations," that the best we can do is "work around the edges." This attitude is both damaging and wrong.

And it is being disproved every day with the help of the No Child Left Behind law.

Five years after the law was passed, we can say with confidence that the law is working. Students in large urban school districts are making greater progress in reading and math than the nation as a whole.

Before NCLB, we had almost no information on how students were doing or how their schools were serving them. Now, data on reading and math achievement are collected and shared every year. Parents receive the same information as principals.

Further, students in under-performing schools are given a second chance with free tutoring or the opportunity to transfer to a better-performing public or public charter school.

We are ready to take the next step forward. President Bush wants to provide Baltimore and other cities with School Improvement Grants to make it easier for community leaders and teachers to join together and overhaul troubled schools.

He also wants to provide the free tutoring to low-income students one year earlier than before.

But we cannot do it alone. Baltimore must want to change. And Baltimore's public schools have the second-lowest graduation rate among the nation's 50 largest school districts. Less than 20 percent of the district's eighth-graders are proficient in math.

But this cannot be blamed on demographics. For instance, 100 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore's KIPP Ujima Village Academy - nearly all of whom are African-American - scored proficient or advanced in math in 2006.

So it can be done. High standards and accountability can overcome high poverty and apathy, in any city or school.

That is the message we must send to our children.

Raymond Simon
Deputy Secretary
U.S. Department of Education