It's so tempting to ignore the latest report bringing bad news about minority and low-income students in Wisconsin schools, yet tempting as it is to take the easy path and ignore bad news, we ignore it at our peril. Ignoring such reports - telling each other that we're doing good enough or all we can - is a part of why our schools and students are in the situation they are.

The latest report comes from The Education Trust, an organization which promotes academic achievement. According to the report, Wisconsin's black fourth-graders had the lowest average reading score in the nation on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Latino students were about one-third of the way down from the top. The difference in reading proficiency between higher- and lower-income students is little changed in fourth grade. Mathematics scores are only slightly better, although the gap between minority students and whites in eighth grade is slightly smaller than it was a few years ago.

Rather than getting lost in blame, consider a challenge because it really does fall here because southeastern Wisconsin has a large share of the state's minority population.

On its Web site, The Education Trust has examples of schools which have performed well despite what would be considered disadvantages. One is a school in Massachusetts where all the students are black or Latino, 70 percent qualify for federal free or reduced-price lunches, 12 percent have learning disabilities and only about one-quarter of incoming sixth-graders scored proficient or higher on state tests compared to about half of the state's fifth-graders.

After a year, these students meet state averages. After a couple of years they're better, especially in math. The school staff says their students do not lack ability but preparation, and that is the key point for all of us here. A rigorous program helps, school autonomy helps, and several hours of homework help but consider that if children were inspired or pushed at home to study longer and harder, we could move ourselves toward better student achievement in all grades.

This is also a mark of the need for lighted schoolhouses and preparatory programs like Head Start and 4-year-old kindergarten - all of which prepare children for the serious work of learning. There truly is a great deal to be said for the idea of making sure that children come to school with basic ideas about letters and numbers, basic ability to discipline themselves and certain knowledge that school demands will be enforced at home.

So we don't want to read the bad news today. OK, maybe it's been a long day. Take a breath and read it tomorrow, and act. Don't complain about what Unified didn't do or what the state should do. Do what you can do right now for students today.