Everything, it turns out, is not for sale.

But for a brief period, a test score did carry a price tag at Rosewood Middle School in Wayne County. When word spread, however, the offer went poof.

Unfortunately, public schools have increasingly turned to fund-raisers in recent years to meet needs that otherwise would not be met because of budget restraints. While that is a different Our View for another day, we find it unfortunate that students are so often put into a position of having to raise money for supplies that should be furnished by taxpayers.

At Rosewood Middle, last year’s fund-raiser, the sale of chocolates, bombed, so this year a parents advisory council came up with a curious idea to raise money for the purchase of digital cameras for a school lab and a high-tech blackboard: A $20 donation to the school would allow students to bump the score of any two tests of their choosing by 10 points each, and for $60, the student would get the 20 points, admission to a dance and a pizza lunch for two.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, the school principal originally gave a thumbs up to the idea, saying that two 10-point bumps would be unlikely to affect a student’s final grade. But as school administrators got the word, the fund-raiser was quickly canceled. While the potential effect of selling 20 points on two test scores might have been negligible, there is a principle at work here: The fund-raiser, had it been allowed, would not have been benign because it would have sent to students exactly the wrong message: That there is an avenue other than studying, doing the homework, paying attention in class, etc., to academic achievement.

There isn’t, of course, and we should be careful in a country where public schools are struggling to educate our children to send any message but the correct one. In a time of TIVO, fast food, and Blackberrys, our students must understand that not everything comes with an Easy Button, and that hard work still has a value.