The California Board of Education's recent decision to delay the impact of the state's new high school exit exam was a disappointing but necessary tactical retreat that should ultimately advance the long-term goal of accountability in the public schools.

If the ed board hadn't backed off, the legal dogs would have sued the state on behalf of thousands of students in the class of 2004 who would have been denied diplomas after failing the test. Their argument: These kids never got a fair opportunity to learn the material on which they were tested. Unfortunately, they are probably right.

The standards upon which the test is based were adopted in the late 1990s and weren't implemented by many schools for a year or two after that. By then, most of next year's seniors were already well on their way to graduation. These students were denied a quality education. It would add insult to their educational injury to now also deny them a diploma. So we will give them their certificate, even if it lacks real value.

The alternatives the board considered were worse than delay. One was to make the test easier. The other was to lower the passing score. Instead, other than dropping one essay requirement to shorten from two days to one the time it takes to administer the language portion of the exam, the board stayed the course. This is good news.

But fans of reform should not rest easy. The test's opponents will see this decision not as a momentary pause but as a crack in the door. They will continue to push to weaken accountability because they do not believe in it. They have said they do not think that tests are a good measure of what a student has learned, and they don't think a test should be used to decide whether a student has learned enough to earn a diploma. Even if the student gets multiple chances to pass the exam.

The high school exit exam has become their primary target because, of all the tests the state administers, this is the only one that truly counts. The annual tests given in second through eleventh grades provide parents, teachers and pupils a sense of where students stand. The results are also used to measure the progress that schools, districts and the state are making. But they carry no consequences for individual students.

The exit exam is different. It means something, and that meaning makes it dangerous. When kids fail, people start asking questions. Did the child try hard enough? Did the parents push hard enough? Did the school provide the proper coursework and materials? Was the teaching sufficient?

All of those questions are uncomfortable for a segment of the education establishment that would rather fuzz things up, pat kids on the head for making a good try and send them on their way with no concrete sense of what they have taken with them after 13 years of seat time in the public schools. This is a mindset that has filled our colleges with remedial classes and has frustrated employers who can't find a clerk who can spell or compute.

But there is one more question that the exit exam provokes that will make its supporters just as uncomfortable. And it is the question that eventually will decide whether California has the guts to continue down this road.

That question is: Can we admit that any child will fail? The exit exam by its nature picks a set of math and language skills that we as a society, through our legislators, governor and education policymakers, have said students should master before graduating from high school. If we set that bar high enough to mean anything, some students will be unable to clear it. This does not mean they will be failures in life; only that they could not or did not learn the material considered essential for a high school graduate. Still, it is a difficult concept for many to accept, especially many in the political world.

The most recent numbers for the class that got away -- 2004 -- showed that barely half passed both portions of the exam. But the trends were positive, and some experts predicted that around 80 percent would eventually have passed. Meanwhile, an independent report showed that the test's presence was pushing the schools to implement the standards and shower extra attention on the students who were slipping behind, exactly what it was designed to do.

So now the burden falls to the class of 2006 -- and to the adults who believe that standards and accountability are not punishment for the weak but our greatest tool for ensuring that every California child is offered the opportunity to gain the tools necessary to compete in a modern economy.