City Lights:

One of the more maddening stories I’ve covered as a reporter was the one about the school that got slapped with federal sanctions because one student failed a test.

Under Adequate Yearly Progress, the tracking system implemented under No Child Left Behind, a certain percentage of students at each school must score as proficient or higher on standardized tests, and that goes for subgroups of students as well. At the school I covered, one too many students in the English-learner subgroup failed the English test, and because that left the subgroup just short of the required percentage, the entire campus was forced to make changes or risk federal takeover.

Did that last paragraph sound like a mouthful? If so, then you have an idea of how bureaucratic education can be — and how numbers, sometimes, can get in the way of joy of learning.

No Child Left Behind mandates that by 2014, 100% of students be proficient in math and English. I don’t know if there’s a human being alive who truly believes that’s an attainable goal, and I’m sure it’s embittered more than a few teachers and staff. But one who’s not bitter is Dan Bryan, the new principal of Ocean View High School.

I met Bryan in his office last week to find out how he was holding up midway through his first year. A veteran of public education, he started as a student teacher at Ocean View in 1991 and served as a teacher and administrator at other campuses before returning to his old grounds.

Ocean View, like many schools in modern America, is labeled under No Child Left Behind as a Program Improvement school — one that has to meet federal requirements for two years in a row or risk sanctions. The school landed on the list in 2009 because two subgroups, Latino students and English learners, didn’t meet the percentage of students required to score as proficient or higher.

A tough situation? Sure. But when I spoke to Bryan, I got the feeling that he still goes to work every morning jazzed to be a principal.

Test scores are important to Bryan — they have to be — and he’s busy lining up an after-school intervention program this spring to help students who are struggling to pass the California High School Exit Examination. He’s encouraging faculty to meet every Wednesday to compare notes, and crossing his fingers that all that attention will add up to Adequate Yearly Progress.

But our conversation only lingered briefly on test scores. Bryan raved about his school’s sports and music programs, the electives that students line up to take, the relatively small student body that allows teachers to interact more with kids. A school, he said, is a community of its own, and kids tend to work harder if they have an incentive to come to campus.

“If we stay on them every day, the numbers will take care of themselves,” Bryan said.

Listening to him, I thought of all the things I remember most about school. I remember the English teacher who played us 1960s rock in the classroom to flesh out our readings on Vietnam, the basketball games I covered for the school paper, the early-morning band practices. Ask me anything about the questions on the SAT, and I won’t be able to tell you.

That’s not to say students shouldn’t take standardized tests, but I’m glad there are people like Bryan who stress that school is a place for self-growth and discovery, where the most important thing is not perfection but the pursuit of excellence.

Come 2014, I hope the government will agree with him.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com .