Changing school with the season

It's a sunny day in Grandview, crisp and pleasant. Bright wooden cutouts of fruit lining the main drag hint at just how entwined this town's identity is with agriculture. A faint smell of manure wafts through the streets.

In the fall, Marie and Armando's five children were spread between three schools. Grandview has six schools serving about 3,000 students, 550 of whom are migrant.

By many measures, they are adjusting well. Christina's transition into ninth grade has been smooth. In a room redolent of melting butter, her home economics teacher notes that the entire freshman class is, after all, new to Grandview High School. Besides, the faculty and students are familiar with families cycling in and out.

Jorge - the family "inventor" - is thriving in sixth-grade science. On this Tuesday, he's the first to connect a battery, compass, and light bulb to test electromagnetic strength.

Raul's second-grade teacher feels comfortable seating him at the back of the room. He's "a strong student," she says, able to concentrate through rows of distractions.

At recess, Mickaela twirls a jump-rope as a gaggle of second-grade girls, ponytails flying, runs through.

And Juana, liquid eyes framed by wispy strands of dark hair escaped from her braid, shyly professes to love homework. She blends easily with her classmates at Smith Elementary, where fair-haired children are in the minority. In her dual-language first-grade class - the morning is conducted in English, the afternoon in Spanish - one blond boy sticks out in a sea of dark heads.

But there's a murkier side, too.

Becky Knott, her teacher, says that Juana rarely takes assignments home, and they don't always make it back. During her 15 years in Grandview, Mrs. Knott has seen countless migrant students filter through, many of whom, even at that young age, "come in low because they haven't been in one place long enough to learn anything." But with a supportive family and school, she says, they often "just zoom - they excel."

Mickaela and Raul are pulled out of class daily for ESL lessons.

And at 8:40 every morning, Jorge joins a reading class for special-education students. Though he is clearly at the top of his class, impatient as his classmates struggle to sound out words - rugs, pop, stop, swimming - whispering answers to Sergio on his right, he reads at a first-grade level.

Twenty-four percent of the district's migrant students are a year behind grade level; 2 percent are two or more years behind, according to the state's Migrant Student Data and Recruitment Office. The 44,000 migrant students statewide are performing at about the same level.

Forty years have passed since the federal government, as part of President Johnson's Great Society program, promised to educate all children. The Migrant Education Program was created in 1966, at a time when just 1 in 10 migrant students finished high school. In the '80s, graduation rates reached about 50 percent - still one of the lowest for any group - where they hover today. President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, reauthorizing Johnson's education law and reaffirming a commitment to all students, with a special pledge to poor and minority families.

And in places with year-round growing seasons, where rows of crops have long abutted school buildings, many districts are successfully addressing migrant students' needs. Even tiny Montana, with just 1,600 migrants, is held up as an example. But in other states, where their presence may be newer, or where fewer trickle through each year, many migrant students linger in the shadows.

Educators say that the goal of NCLB, to shine a light on subgroups such as "migrant" by scrutinizing their progress and holding districts and states accountable for their performance, is laudable. But, as with the law more broadly, it's the implementation that has drawn concern.

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