WITH STUDIES unending; with billions of federal, state and local taxes having been spent on public education in the last 15 years, the way things truly are may be taken from one paragraph in a letter that The Journal recently published from Peter S. Allen, a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College. Professor Allen and his wife have sent their four children to the Nathanael Greene Middle School, in Providence. For the last three years they have received the same letter from the city’s superintendent of schools, Donnie Evans.

Mr. Allen quotes the letter: “As part of the federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Rhode Island Department of Education has identified all public schools in the state as in need of improvement, moderate performing or high performing based on their students’ performance on State standardized tests. The state has also designated schools in need of improvement as making or not making progress. . . . Unfortunately, your child’s middle school did not meet all 37 improvement targets and is considered low performing and not making progress according to RIDE [Rhode Island Department of Education]. The Providence School Department is required to offer your child the option of attending another district middle school that did meet all the required targets. Since there are no middle schools classified as improving, according to RIDE’s classifications, we cannot offer your child choice at this time.”

The last sentence tells what we need to know about public education in the United States. Here, I believe, is what the 22 words of that sentence really mean:

“Since there are no middle schools classified as improving . . .” Since when? Since forever is the correct answer, i.e., since some pencil pusher had the brainstorm that the traditional K-through-grade-6 grammar school had only produced losers such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Gen. George Marshall. The thing was to decapitate the grammar school, with its reliance on a single ninny of a teacher, at the fifth grade (generally); to amputate the feet of 7-through-9 junior high schools at the eighth grade; and to sew these parts together into huge (thus efficient) middle schools, where the halls would be filled with milling students as young as 9 and as old as 15 on their way from teacher to teacher and from class to class. In practice, especially in poor neighborhoods, 16-year-olds are part of the mill.

The first middle school in the United States opened in Bay City, Mich., in 1950, but the fad didn’t get rolling until about 1970. In 1971, there were 1,662 6-through-8 (the most common configuration) middle schools. By 2000, there were 8,371 of those, and 14,107 middle schools, including other grade configurations.

The middle-school concept had everything going for it except common sense. It put latency-age boys and girls into warehouses with all the attendant behaviors of adolescents with fully developed secondary sex characteristics. Large primary schools ruled by “ninnies” might work, but early adolescence is a time when children are better served under close supervision. Accordingly, the city of Kansas City, Mo., has done away with its middle schools, and returned students through the eighth grade to single classrooms overseen by single, tough-loving teachers. Meanwhile, across the Missouri, Kansas City, Kans., clings to its middle schools. If a run of bad luck gets you and your family transferred to Kansas City, settle on the Missouri side of the Missouri!

The answer to “Since when?” leads to a second key word Professor Allen quotes: “no,” as in “no middle schools classified as improving.” No means none, nada de eso, pas un seul — pick a language. Providence doesn’t have any, and neither do hundreds of cities badly serving immigrant, low-income and minority populations in the U.S.

The next key word is “classified,” which tells us that everything under No Child Left Behind may be baloney. A huge, generally left-leaning bureaucracy — the American education establishment — has been given a new, right-leaning head under a slogan that is a bald-faced lie. For even the best of prep schools “leave children behind.” It’s humanly impossible not to. The issue here is that “classified” in the bureaucratic sense is sometimes unreliable: Schools officially classified as non-improving sometimes work miracles.

But we must take the vast reported discrepancy between urban and suburban schools as evidence that the classification is largely right. That leads to the superintendent’s most telling phrase: “We cannot offer your child choice at this time.” That really means “forever,” because at the pace public education changes, your child, who only gets one chance not to be left behind, will be in jail, not at Yale, before anything gets done.

In July, a bill was filed in the U.S. Senate to reduce the high-school drop-out rate. A week later, a House bill was filed. Its purpose is to improve the performance of middle schools in the United States. Since neither bill has any Republican co-sponsor, both are idle stunts.

During the 20th Century the graduation rate gradually rose to 45 percent in 1940, dipped to 40 percent during the War, then rose to 78 percent in 1965 — the year the federal government began bankrolling primary and secondary education. Since then it has been essentially flat. Since 1965, almost no one in the fattened federal, state and local bureaucracies has taken issue with a crime the nation renews every school day: Our children are prisoners of geography.

Professor and Mrs. Allen’s eldest child deserved a better school — public or private, somewhere else if not in Providence — the first year the Nathanael Greene Middle School was found “not improving.” So do millions of others. It is a moral issue.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.