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I noticed in today’s Lowell Sun, an article illustrating the congressional candidates’ surface positions regarding No Child Left Behind, which is up for re-authorization and will be instrumental in shaping the future of public education in this country. Where the candidates stand on this issue and their understanding of the implications of the law are areas I’m hoping to learn more about during tonight’s candidates forum at Lowell High School’s Little Theater, beginning at 7 p.m. In the meantime, if you want to update yourself on the No Child Left Behind debate, check out this May 24 article in TIME magazine, which was sent to me by Sheila, a retired teacher.

As you can see by the photo below of some graduates from this year’s Latin Lyceum, taken at its Arete Awards ceremony last week, the group of smiling seniors illustrates something people used to think wasn’t possible: That is, you could have a rigorous, exam-based, public high school in Lowell that challenged top students and represented the diversity of our population. When it first began nine years ago, most of the Lyceum students came from private middle schools, but that percentage has been changing steadily. As the middle schools have raised expectations and done a better job of challenging our highest-achieving students, more than half (I think last year it was about 65%) of Lyceum students are products of our public middle schools.

In addition to its success in Lowell, Lyceum graduates excel with their peers from wealthier districts who are members of the brightest high school students the state has to offer. Evidence of our youngsters’ success is not based simply on MCAS scores, which are stellar, or even the percentage of our students who go on to college, which is 100%, but also is shown by the range of top schools these young people attend, such as Tufts, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Emerson, to name a few. One student I noticed, particularly because I knew his father Alvaro from the Citywide Parent Council, was Ivan Soares. Ivan began his education in Lowell at the Rogers Middle School when he was 11 years old and unable to speak English. Yet Ivan graduates this year with a 90% scholarship to Yale (tuition there runs about $48,000 a year) or he could have held out for Harvard, where he was wait listed. Obviously Lyceum students are not the only LHS graduates to go to top colleges each year (more on that later), but their impressive results further attests that this academy has been a good thing for Lowell Public Schools and its students.