Our view: An African proverb holds that when elephants fight the grass suffers.

So it was painfully predictable that North County's schoolchildren would suffer when a zillion-dollar showdown over test scores developed between the giant bureaucracies that uphold state and federal education policies.

This struggle began in earnest with Wednesday's release of test scores that branded more than a third of all North County schools as failing —— 10 percent face federal sanctions.

Let's make it clear up front that landing on the federal sanctions list does not mean your school is a failure. Under the impossibly optimistic No Child Left Behind law, each of several narrowly defined groups of students must meet federal standards. If any one segment misses, the entire school goes on the list.

Penalties include giving parents the right to transfer their children to better-performing schools. This poses a logistical nightmare for administrators if the first month of school becomes a circus fire drill of shifting student populations.

Complicating matters for parents, transfer rights will soon become meaningless: Federal standards get tougher each year, leading state officials to predict that nearly every school in California will fail eventually.

Other sanctions require schools to provide tutoring, give extra training to teachers and provide for the outright takeover of failing school districts by state officials. All this costs money, lots of money. Thinking ahead, Washington dramatically boosted funding.

However, some local administrators are maneuvering to give up millions of dollars in federal funds. Their strategy is to minimize the effects of sanctions by wriggling out of federal control.

Welcome to the nation's law to improve education that four years after passage has North County educators moving to essentially cut their own funding.

President Bush gets credit and the blame for the measure, although the ideas behind No Child Left Behind were gaining currency in Washington well before his election. The strategy was to force local administrators to teach all their children, instead of focusing resources on those with the greatest chances of success.

As enacted, the law is poised to punish children instead of school administrators.

Low scores are generally concentrated among kids with learning disabilities, those learning English as a second language, or children whose parents struggle with low incomes. It stands to reason that educators with high proportions of such children would have a tougher time meeting federal standards.

Of course, this describes most of North County's school districts. Performance can only get worse if districts give up special funding.

Widespread transfers pose a separate risk, because funding is based on student attendance. Flight from low-scoring schools will only drain cash.

In the meantime, it's worth noting that No Child Left Behind has spurred improvements.

For example, Oceanside teaches many children who are recent immigrants or have low family incomes. But Oceanside has just one school facing federal sanctions, far fewer than districts with similar demographics. What accounts for the difference?

The short answer is Ken Noonan, Oceanside's superintendent. When the federal law passed, Noonan got his district busy figuring out how to meet the standards. Now he worries that more of his schools will drop onto sanctions lists in a few years.

Lost in the shuffle is the remarkable and steady progress by North County's schools in recent years.

No Child Left Behind badly needs revision. Federal lawmakers must deal with unintended consequences such as the movement to abandon federal funding and a transfer privilege that sows chaos in our districts.

Administrators get paid to suffer foolhardy lawmaking. We can't afford to make our children suffer, too.