Great news! None of California's schools is dangerous anymore.

This may come as a surprise to the kids at Los Angeles Unified's notoriously dicey Banning High, to pick one example. At Banning, 28 battery cases, a robbery, two assaults with a deadly weapon and three sex offenses were reported in the 2001-'02 school year.

But the state Board of Education last week declared that neither Banning nor any other school in California should be called "persistently dangerous." Accept this sunny proclamation with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Under orders from the Bush administration to issue a list of persistently dangerous schools, and to allow students attending such schools to transfer out, the state board came up with a tidy solution: Declare them all safe. This avoids the hassle of having to accommodate all those kids who might want to get out of those schools they're afraid to walk home from.

Are there many such schools in California? Probably not. But it is safe to say there are some, and that makes the state board's action impossible to take seriously.

Ironically, the structure of the federal mandate, which is contained in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), encourages states to do just what California did. The act allows states to set their own definition of "persistently dangerous."

The state board adopted the following definition: A school is persistently dangerous if at least one of its students has been caught with a firearm in each of the last three years, and if the campus has expelled at least 1 percent of its students each year for hate crimes, extortion, sexual assault or other violence. Like magic, none of the state's 8,000 schools qualified.

But if, at some future time, they were to come close to qualifying for the statewide blacklist, schools would have an easy out. Just stop expelling so many violent students. That inviting strategy ought to give comfort to parents everywhere.

The firearms threshold is equally absurd. Guns may be the vice principal's biggest worry, but the presence of knives, chains or even chronic fist fights could qualify a school as persistently dangerous by any reasonable definition. Which is exactly what the state board's adopted standard is not.

The Bush administration and Congress can be faulted for allowing the states so much leeway in writing their own definitions under NCLB. But California should have taken this responsibility much more seriously.