The national journal Science just published a report on how the No Child Left Behind academic benchmarks will lead to a “widespread failure” among California’s elementary schools. Education Week picked up the story, though there is no new news here for New Jersey’s school boards and administrators: lest a deus ex machina intervene, many NJ public schools will fail to meet federal and state benchmarks. Here’s the list of sanctions (courtesy of the NJ DOE), which escalate each year:

As both Science and the Edweek article point out, one of the main reasons for failure is test scores of two specific groups: new English speakers and economically disadvantaged kids. (The special ed kids are a whole other story.)

It is all a strange kind of shell game. NCLB mandates 100% of all children – regardless of socio-economic background, disability, preschool attendance, whatever – will demonstrate “proficiency” through standardized testing by 2014.

And New Jersey marches in lock-step, creating monitoring standards that mirror the Feds.

Here’s the game: you’re not allowed to say that some kids, regardless of intervention, will not pass.

So, what do NJ districts do? The same as anyone else forced into a game of gotcha. You put your energy where you have the best chance of increasing your score, even though you know in the end you’ll lose. Administrators and school board members huddle in rooms endlessly recalibrating test scores, searching for the overlooked point, whispering to each other, “we’re never going to make this number.” Everyone knows it’s true, at least in the districts that have larger numbers of those kids who tend to do poorly, like the cohorts mentioned in the Science article: new English speakers and the kids from poor homes.

I haven’t met a board member or teacher or administrator who doesn’t want to improve achievement for all kids. But the NCLB laws, and the NJ DOE’s blind deference to those laws, puts districts in the odd position of focusing their resources on a particular kind of kid, that gem who will move scores in the right direction.

Who is that gem? Not the high-achievers, because they are already labeled “proficient.” There’s no extra points for raising their scores.

The kids way at the bottom of the heap? Too much of a gamble though, to be fair, most districts really try to work with them.

But it’s those kids “in the bubble” who get districts drooling, those kids who come close to passing but miss by a few points.

Here’s how it works: NCLB and New Jersey statute requires local districts to label kids by certain attributes:

Students With Disabilities
Limited English Proficient
White
African-American
Asian/Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander
American Indian/Native American
Hispanic
Other Race
Economically Disadvantaged

Your district only has to report the cohorts comprised of more than 20 kids in a school. So if you’re in a mostly white district and you have less than 20 kids of a particular ethnicity — think Saddle River or Robbinsville — their scores don’t count. No worries. But if you’re in a district that has some diversity, you have to count all the kids in that group. Economically disadvantaged kids tend to do more poorly on the tests, so your best chance at the NCLB game is targeting those kids. But not all of them – it’s the kids who fall a few points below proficiency that offer you the best chance at raising your score. And there’s even bonus points. Because if your economically disadvantaged kid is also African-American, he or she gets counted twice. And if that kids also is classified as having a learning disability, he gets counted 3 separate times. And if he also demonstrates limited English proficiency – well, forget it. We’re getting greedy.

Maybe it’s not a shell game. Maybe it’s more like the fairy tale of the Emperor without Clothes. But New Jersey school districts are spending vast resources on a game that has no winners.