AINESVILLE, Ga.

IN the late summer of 2003, a few weeks into his first year as principal of Gainesville Elementary School here, Shawn Arevalo McCollough identified 125 pupils who were lagging a grade or two behind in reading and math. He could surmise that most were poor and nonwhite, because virtually his entire student body was poor and nonwhite. More precisely, most of these children were new immigrants from Mexico whose parents had been drawn to this small city by the exhausting but ample jobs in its chicken-processing plants.

Mr. McCollough decreed that the 125 pupils should stay for an extra three hours of class each weekday and seven hours on Saturday, the additional time creating the equivalent of an eight-day school week. Then he solicited the children and their parents, one family at a time, visiting rusted house trailers and weathered cottages besieged by kudzu vines, tracking down one father in the lavanderia, the Laundromat.

When the principal was done and the first Saturday session commenced, he noticed that Fatima Rodriguez, a third grader one year out of Guadalajara and one year behind in school, was absent. So he called her home and he called around town and eventually he learned that she was at church, taking classes for her first communion. A few days later, Mr. McCollough invited Fatima's mother to his office and told her, "Unless God Almighty is going to teach Fatima how to read, she's got to be in our school on Saturday." For good measure, he also talked the local Roman Catholic priest into switching the first communion lessons to Friday nights.

So Fatima started to attend on Saturdays, a bit fitfully at first, sometimes oversleeping, sometimes nagging her parents into granting her a day off. Each time she skipped, Mr. McCullough phoned home or drove over, and ultimately she became a regular. And when she took the state basic-skills tests in April 2004, the gateway for promotion to fourth grade, Fatima met the standard. She made her parents a card that said, "Thanks for waking me up."

In a broader sense, it is Mr. McCollough who has sounded the wake-up alarm here, 55 miles northeast of Atlanta. Under his leadership, 89 percent of Gainesville Elementary's students passed the state English-language arts test and 94 percent passed the math test. As a so-called 90-90-90 school - 90 percent nonwhite, 90 percent poor, 90 percent meeting standards - Gainesville received its 45 seconds of fame when President Bush hailed it during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

Which is exactly why it seemed important to spend several days seeing just what the truth of this putative miracle was. The Bush administration's education policy, much like its tax cuts and Iraq invasion, has been one more polarizing element in a bitter and divisive campaign season. Indeed, some of the vaunted success in Houston's schools turned out to be the result of administrators' obscuring the actual dropout rate.

No matter what one thinks of the president's endorsement, however, Gainesville Elementary School and its principal are for real. At the same time, their accomplishment represents something more complex than the triumph of the No Child Left Behind law.

No statute could conjure up a principal of Mr. McCollough's varied and complementary skills. Part Filipino, part Spanish, part Anglo, he grew up attending the mostly black and mostly abysmal public schools of Columbia, S.C., experiencing minimal expectations firsthand. Even now, when he dresses in shorts and T-shirts for his weekend work in the office, he is followed by security guards in department stores, attracting the same kind of suspicions that Gainesville's Mexican immigrants endure.

Leading a school that is two-thirds Hispanic, Mr. McCollough insisted that every front-office worker be bilingual, as is about half of the faculty. He created an adult-literacy program with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a civil-rights organization. On his desk sits a copy of Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a veritable holy book for radical educators.

"I'm a social reconstructionist by nature," Mr. McCollough, 33, said in an interview. "I believe schools are here to change the landscape, to shift the power."

Yet his means of doing so fall firmly on the conservative side of the educational spectrum. He does not pull out children for separate bilingual classes, offering only "survival skills English" two hours a day for a maximum of eight weeks. He has reached out to Gainesville's financial establishment, gaining a $20,000 grant for the Saturday school from Mar-Jac, one of the major poultry companies. He culled an additional $20,000 for the lengthened weekday classes by deferring purchases of textbooks and other materials.