For five years, California's attempt to fix failing schools was confused and in disarray. But the federal No Child Left Behind Act has a timetable and sanctions that hold the state's feet to the fire, and this has forced California to make a long-overdue change. State officials now have adopted an academically focused school-improvement method that should work to rescue failing schools. The state and its school districts need to persist in this effort.

Under the federal law, California (like other states) must use results from standardized tests as report cards for schools. Poorly performing schools must improve the achievement of all students -- including subgroups based on race, language, sex and income -- or face escalating sanctions. These sanctions include the mind-concentrating possibility of a school takeover and the replacement of a school's principal and teachers.

California's recent experience shows that a statewide effort to fix schools easily can go astray. Experience has taught California that school recovery requires a persistent focus on academics.

From 1999 until 2003, California sent contractors into the classroom to observe, find out what was being done improperly and then guide each school in creating a tailored improvement plan. Rescue plans based on classroom observations were hands-on, school-specific and collaborative. But they didn't work.

As it turned out, it was difficult for these audit teams to discover what academic content was omitted during an entire year. Also, teachers, as you might expect, act differently when they know they are being watched.

Worse, the audit approach was largely unsystematic, even idiosyncratic. Many suggestions from the observation teams were, in the words of one critic, "off the wall'' (for example, one recommendation called on teachers to undergo 350 hours of training). Teams often offered pet ideas or vague prescriptions. (One school was ordered to prepare students to "read at a level that allows them to be contributing members of society.'' Such a standard could be interpreted as reading Tolstoy -- or a traffic sign.)

Unfortunately, some schools spent a considerable amount of time in meetings but neglected to buckle down on the hard work of improving student achievement. School improvement did not concentrate on how well teachers knew their subjects and how well students were learning the subject matter.

California officials learned from these failures (evident in continued low test scores in these schools) and began trying a new approach. Now the rescue effort focuses on the subject-matter content in math and English reading and writing that is found in the California Content Standards and judged by the state to be what students need to know. The new approach tries to ensure that this academic content is transmitted to students.

In one Fresno-area school, the state intervention group found that the school staff did not "recognize or accept their professional responsibility'' for students' successes and failures. This school's principal has said the intervention group's analysis of the school resulted in a schoolwide effort to align lessons with the state's demanding expectations of what students should learn.

Special training now helps teachers make better use of textbooks that cover the required academic content. Teachers use electronically recorded data from state tests and from lesson-based tests to determine student weaknesses.

Under the new approach, district officials monitor school progress. If the school continues to make insufficient progress, the state sends in specialists on the math or English curriculum being taught in the school. The new approach is realistic because it does not expect the state to run hundreds (or thousands) of failing schools from Sacramento, nor does it require principals who are superhuman. Instead, the new approach to school recovery asks for steady, systematic work.

By 2014, the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that all students must reach proficiency and that schools no longer fail in teaching our students. California's pre-2004 experience has taught us that unfocused, observation-based improvement plans result in a jumble and are a waste of time, effort and money.

California's new approach to fixing failing schools is down-to-earth school reform. It calls for steady improvement in student mastery of academic content. It calls for teacher effectiveness, but provides reliable tools for attaining that effectiveness. We'll have to watch it to see if it succeeds, but it certainly has a reasonable prospect for success.

Bill Evers, a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Education, is a research fellow and member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Lance Izumi is a senior fellow and director of educational studies at the Pacific Research Institute. They wrote this article for the Mercury News.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: The Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education offers recommendations for strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act in "Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child," a book out this month. Bill Evers, a task force member, commends California's program for improving failing schools in a commentary on today's Op-Ed page.