In a memo released Monday, Education Commissioner Lucille Davy announced that the U.S. Department of Education had approved some New Jersey slippage in our nation’s indefatigable climb toward 100% proficiency among American schoolchildren known as “No Child Left Behind” or, in some circles, as the “Lake Wobegone Effect.” You know: all our children are strong, good-looking, and above average.

Over the summer the NJ DOE ramped up the definition of “proficiency” by changing the tests and raising the bar for passing scores. In order to tamp down the pending widespread failure among our school districts, Davy then petitioned the US DOE for some leeway. From the memo:

“These changes were necessary because of the redesign of our grade 5-8 tests this year,” Commissioner Davy explained. “The new tests measure higher order skills. In addition, the standards for proficiency were raised, which means that students have to answer more questions correctly in order to be deemed proficient. It would have been extremely difficult to compare 2007 to 2008 in a fair and equitable manner without these adjustments to our federal workbook. We needed a new system that would have more appropriate targets while recognizing progress.

So only an additional 66 schools will fail to make “adequate yearly progress,” though we still have to make 100% proficiency by 2014. But no worries. The DOE probably feels safe in assuming that NCLB will implode over the next six years as more and more schools in every state fail to make the proficiency levels set by the Feds.

Here’s our conundrum. Despite the bit of slack we’ve just received from the U.S. DOE, more and more schools in NJ will fail to progress “adequately.” (It’s not just us – this will happen all over the country. If all it took to make kids learn were more tests, we’d be in the catbird seat, Cheshire grins and all.) To add to the headwind, the New Jersey High School Redesign Steering Committee has recently announced that high school graduation requirements will be significantly raised. Reports My Central Jersey,

The New Jersey High School Redesign Steering Committee released these findings last April after dismal surveys and statistics showing nearly eight out of every 10 students entering the community college system require remedial courses; only one out of every four New Jersey students earns a bachelor’s degree; and 99 of 100 large state employers surveyed characterized high school students as under-prepared for the work force.

The group calls for immediate curriculum changes beginning with the current class of high school freshmen, requiring more challenging math, science and language arts literacy courses, and 10 additional academic credits, which would raise the state minimum requirement to 120.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that a number of schools, mainly those in poorer districts, don’t have adequate lab facilities, or that we don’t have enough highly-qualified teachers in chemistry and physics, or that NJ’s already high dropout rate will likely increase. Where do we go with the double-whammy of higher demands from both the State and the Federal government? Add to that the diminished capacity of NJ to fund schools in the current economic meltdown, new expensive initiatives like mandated preschools (though Corzine is getting fuzzy on that), local school boards’ inability to keep teacher salary hikes within COLA, or even within budget caps, and it seems like we’re running out of oxygen.

Maybe it’s not so grim. President-Elect Obama is rumored to be open to essential changes like merit pay for teachers and the escalation of the charter school movement. We’ve got rising stars like Mayor Cory Booker of Newark (see this post) who seems to have the guts to take on the NJEA. But we really need to stop pretending that our kids’ educational ascent can be engineered by shifting numbers around on a government document.