Sad to read that the News of Orange County’s editorial page is endorsing the ill-conceived idea of looking at merging the county’s lowest performing and highest performing elementary schools, which I blogged about a few days ago. The idea is an obvious attempt to circumvent performance standards of the No Child Left Behind law, which the low performing school is failing to meet. If we are to adopt the newspaper’s logic, then the board should consider every idea that comes to mind, no matter what. The sad fact is that while the board spends time and resources on this misadventure, time and resources is not spent addressing what’s really amiss at the low performing school. That’s a tough assignment, but isn’t that what school board members, administrators and teachers are hired to do?