Listen!

Hear that sigh of relief? It’s coming from Muscogee County educators, relieved that Georgia has been granted a waiver from No Child Left Behind.

Everybody’s still sorting through the new requirements, but Superintendent Susan Andrews seemed pleased on Thursday, calling them “more flexible” and “not as rigid as we had.”

Others are pausing from the celebration to remember the old standards as “unfair,” “unrealistic” and “a terrible strain.”

There’s no doubt that No Child Left Behind was flawed. Under this system, principals welcoming a new disabled student were conditioned to immediately recalculate their schools’ odds of making AYP.

And principals and teachers were spending precious hours on Facebook tracking down the whereabouts of former students so they wouldn’t be penalized for having students who were absent during the test.

Every student in every category and every tiny bubble on every score sheet was potentially the difference between rejoicing and mourning.

So it’s a good thing that the focus in education seems to have shifted from perfection for everybody to growth and progress for individual students and individual schools.

But I think it’s a mistake to dismiss the last seven months as a long, dark nightmare from which we’ve just awakened to find the sun shining and everybody dancing and singing.

Sure, Muscogee County was being judged by rigid, unfair, unrealistic, inflexible and terribly straining standards. But remember, so was every other school district in Georgia, and our district finished well below the state average and in ninth place in our 11-district comparison group.

While the last seven months have been miserable for educators, they’ve also been enlightening for taxpayers.

We’ve realized that Muscogee County students in Title I schools, or schools with a majority of students living in poverty, generally perform at a much lower rate than students from non-Title I schools.

That’s not surprising. But we’ve also realized that our Title I schools lag far behind most of the state’s other Title I schools.

And we’ve realized that our so-called privileged non-Title I schools, the majority of which are located north of Macon Road, are making progress at roughly the same rate as the state’s so-called disadvantaged Title I schools.

April should be interesting.

That’s when we get our first report card based on the new standards, but this new rating will be based on the same 2011 CRCT scores used to tally last summer’s AYP results.

Out of 11 districts on the CRCT, Muscogee County finished sixth in reading and eighth in math, which is better than our No. 9 showing for AYP.

In case you’re wondering, we finished in the top of the pack in eighth-grade math and seventh-grade reading, but near the bottom in sixth-grade reading and third-, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade math.

So take away the voodoo magic of the No Child Left Behind formula, and we might look slightly better compared to the rest of the state than we appeared to be last year.

But are we where we want to be?

No.

The last seven months have taught us this. We shouldn’t forget it, and it should be our motivation for years to come.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, managing editor, can be reached at dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com