It's not test scores that count, but what students actually have in their heads.

Freshmen are showing up at Cal State San Bernardino unprepared for college work.

Two-thirds of first-time freshmen this year arrived unable to handle freshman English. Nearly 60 percent couldn't handle freshman math.

It's not as if they can't learn. Nearly 80 percent of Cal State San Bernardino students who need remediation classes become proficient their freshman year.

It's just that they're disadvantaged by the schools that are supposed to be teaching them. College freshmen shouldn't need a second chance to learn what they should have learned in high school.

Judging from the latest results of tests based on tougher standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, more than half of San Bernardino County's schools are being left behind.

Although even that indicator may not be more a result of unrealistic expectations than a measure of whether students are being adequately schooled.

While more than 90 percent of county schools showed improvement on the state's Academic Performance Index, the schools stumbled on the federal challenge, because they didn't test enough of the student body the federal test requires 95 percent participation and not enough students tested proficient in English and math.

Part of the problem there stems from expecting limited-English-speaking and special-education students to meet the same targets as everyone else.

Whether or not the federal standards legitimately test academic performance, it's a given that for all of the countless tests high school students have to take, they are not learning enough of what they need to know at the college level.

High schools need to stop teaching to the test, and teach our kids! Instead of focusing on so-called accountability and test scores, the schools need to zero in on what matters.

The high schools are failing our kids by graduating them without teaching them what they need to know to succeed in college.

Grooming students merely to pass high school and the new high school exit exam yet leaving them empty-handed at the college door is a crime against our youth.

When college freshmen say they were never taught the basics of good grammar or the elements of sentence structure how to craft a sentence or write an essay, let alone how to do a research paper they are the children that education left behind.

It's not that the vast majority of our students are stupid. It's that they either weren't given the proper training, or they weren't steered in the right direction.

Students who are truant or who slack off in the classroom and expect to catch up later through remediation need to be counseled that those paths aren't the smartest direction to take.

"High schools should prepare us for what's coming up instead of doing their own thing," said local high school graduate Ritesh Patel, who earned A's in high school before finding that he was not adequately prepared for college.

Instead of spending so much time on so many tests, educators need to think about what students really need to learn and then set their sights on accomplishing that eminently more pragmatic goal.