No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration's signature education initiative, comes up for Congressional review next year. The NCLB law mandates that schools make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) on a range of variables -- and requires that all of America's schoolchildren achieve proficiency in reading and math by 2013.

Educators, advocates, and parents have long challenged NCLB's expectation of universal proficiency, especially in urban districts like New York City where up to a third of students are English Language Learners and far too many approach middle and high school academically underprepared, without the basic skills to demonstrate proficiency on standardized exams. (The difference in rigor between local and national exams is no small matter, either -- despite apparent test-score gains in New York City and state, results on national measures are disturbingly flat. A new bookfrom Harvard prof Daniel Koretz details the grim state of affairs in our test-saturated school culture.)

Education Week highlighted two new studiessaying that universal proficiency is pie in the Ed sky, and the fact that more and more schools face forced restructuring (a consequence of failing to hit AYP targets for five years) -- 3599 nationwide in the past year alone, which represents a 56% increase in a single year. The trend is likely to crescendo as more and more schools fall short of NCLB marks. And once a school's pushed into restructuring, recovery is unlikely: About one in five restructuring schools surveyed in five states met AYP, leaving the vast majority foundering against remote targets.

The city's schools are subject to AYP targets, too, as well as DOE-imposed progress targets (evaluated on the annual progress reports), and failure on both measures can foretell restructuring or eventual closure. Dozens of city schools are now in the restructuring queue, with dozens more closed or reconfigured anew. While no one can argue against the ideal of universal proficiency, it does seem worth asking why the difficult reality of working with challenging students merits an official rap on the knuckles -- and risks a school's viability in the community.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration exodus to the private sectorhas begun -- two senior ed officials resigned this week.