JEFFERSON CITY • I could have used a quote from Richard Hay almost 30 years ago.

Hay, a former teacher who's now a charter school consultant, appeared in a capital city courtroom last week in an attempt to save St. Louis' Paideia Academy from the charter school scrap heap. Hay's argument reminded me of a debate when I was in high school, one that has yet to be resolved.

Friday's court hearing made that obvious.

Paideia was trying to overturn a state decision that, in effect, revoked its license to operate. One of the arguments the state Board of Education made against Paideia's application is that its students' test scores have been below state standards.

Guilty as charged, said Hay, the charter school consultant. But the state, he argued, is looking at those test scores all wrong: What matters is not how students are performing compared with other students, but whether they are showing improvement, he said.

"Paideia has never denied that its test scores are low," Hay said. "The students they serve come in with bad test scores."

Indeed, the inner-city population that Paideia and other urban schools serve tends to have all sorts of mitigating factors — most of them related to poverty — that lead to poor test scores.

"What you have to look at is the individual student and whether they make progress," Hay said.

I made the same argument back in 1981, along with thousands of other high school debaters.

All year long, we debated whether the federal government should be involved in trying to improve public education.

"Resolved: that the federal government should establish minimum educational standards for elementary and secondary schools in the United States."

That was our topic. Some 20 years later, the Congress answered "yes" by passing the "No Child Left Behind" act. That law set various standards for schools to meet. Among them are certain test score standards.

It's not just charter school advocates who abhor the concept of ranking schools by comparing their test scores. Public school supporters in Missouri and elsewhere also rail against "teaching to the test."

Indeed, trying to compare one school or another is often an apples-to-oranges test that is destined to fail. Is it fair that some private schools with selective admission standards have high scores compared with public schools with lower scores that serve whoever comes through the front door?

Boiled down, that was Hay's argument about Paideia keeping its charter. He lost. The judge ruled against the school, though he didn't address the issue of test scores.

Listening to Hay last week, I was reminded how not much has changed in the education debate over the years. At the core of most proposals to improve the public schools is a fundamental belief that some of those schools are failing.

That philosophy, by its very nature, pits the teachers and administrators who toil in those schools against those who say their children deserve better opportunities.

On this issue, Hay offered another interesting insight in court.

Asked to describe the goal of charter schools, Hay didn't pit them against public schools, but merely suggested their best purpose is to offer parents a choice of something that is different — not necessarily better.

It seemed less combative than the mantra that is so often heard down the street from the courthouse, in the Capitol, where school issues are often portrayed as black and white with little or no gray in between.

Come to think of it, high school debate wasn't much different.

Ultimately, though, it's those state lawmakers, and the ones in Congress, who have to look at the body of work that exists on education issues and decide what is broken and how it can be fixed.

Charter school proponents, of course, point to test scores to back their argument that change is necessary. They have a point.

But as the backers of Paideia found out, that sword cuts deeply both ways.