WASHINGTON — A federal law meant to help children flee unsafe public schools this fall will apply to students in only six states and 52 of the nation's 85,000 schools, a USA TODAY/Gannett News Service survey found.

Under President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, students in "persistently dangerous" schools are entitled to transfers to a safer school. But the law lets states define what "persistently dangerous" means, allowing them to craft a definition that exempts practically every school. Critics charge that few public schools will ever meet the definition.

The national survey of state education departments found that 44 states and the District of Columbia say they have no persistently dangerous schools. In six states, 52 schools made the list. Those states are Pennsylvania with 28, Nevada with eight, New Jersey with seven, Texas with six, New York with two and Oregon with one.

Parents of students in persistently dangerous schools were to be given a chance to transfer their children.

In Pennsylvania, 27 of the 28 dangerous schools are in Philadelphia. The distinction is "a big black eye," schools chief Paul G. Vallas says. "We've got a lot of persistently dangerous schools — not just in Philadelphia, but all across the country," he says. "Some (states) are willing to admit it. Some are not."

Officials in most states set their bar so high that few or no schools would be classified persistently dangerous.

In Maryland, officials originally flagged 36 of the state's 208 high schools, but proposed a revised definition later that cited one. Under the final definition submitted to the federal government, Maryland had no persistently dangerous schools.

Some school officials say the standards present a misleading picture of school violence.

In Pennsylvania, small schools are deemed persistently dangerous if in two of the past three years there have been at least five "dangerous incidents" involving weapons or arrests. For the largest schools, it's 20 such incidents.

In California, officials stamp the dangerous tag on schools if, for three years in a row, at least one student is caught with a gun or has committed a violent crime on school property and at least 1% of students are expelled for serious crimes such as robbery or assault.

Banning Senior High, near Los Angeles, was the scene of 28 batteries, two assaults with a deadly weapon and three sex offenses during the 2001-02 school year. This year, a student died after a fight on campus, but the school is not considered persistently dangerous.

"This is just meaningless. It's a joke," says Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland school safety consultant. "It's a well-intended law that got lost in the politics."

Administration officials say the law does not give them the power to punish states for low-balling school crimes.

"The overall premise here is we want to make sure that whatever definition they set is a realistic one, so parents will have valid information," Education Secretary Rod Paige says.

Tim Buresh, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Unified School District, says the law "is dumb legislation that's not particularly useful to us or parents in dealing with persistently dangerous schools."