For a succinct description of the state of California public education -- and, indeed much of America's -- you could do no better than the one from Jon Sonstelie: "a gap between high expectations and modest means."

Sonstelie, an economist at PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California, heads a study based in a cross section of 49 California school districts to determine how the state's school finance system could be reformed to make it more consistent with the academic standards the state officially hopes to achieve.

It's an ambitious and crucial task. If students are expected to pass exams in order to graduate or to be promoted, and if schools (under both state and federal law) are supposed to make significant yearly progress in raising the achievement of all students, then the people making those demands have a commensurate responsibility to provide the resources -- teachers, books, facilities, counselors -- to give them a fair shot at doing it.

But anyone who surveys the state of school finance and educational policy is likely to conclude that the more likely possibility is not that the gap will be closed with more resources -- at least not in the foreseeable future -- but by lowering or deferring the standards. Every state is in financial trouble and the feds, despite loud promises from the administration, are delivering many billions less than promised.

In some instances, the standards, set in the 1990s by politicians determined to show how tough they could be, were too high to begin with. The goal of NCLB, President Bush's No Child Left Behind education act, that all schools have "highly qualified" teachers by 2005-2006, was probably unattainable even under the best conditions.

So is California's own objective of a score of 800 on the state's test-based Academic Performance Index, which would, in effect, require that 72 percent of the state's students exceed the national median.

That hardly means that high standards set by state or federal law -- in reading, in general test scores, in teacher qualifications -- ought to be scrapped. Both the NCLB and the California standards are precedent-setting in that they demand improved performance not only from the average student, but require higher achievement from major subgroups -- blacks, Latinos, poor kids -- who've often been neglected before.

But the hurdles may well need to be reconsidered, especially since many of them rested on a logical inconsistency. Anything that would challenge above-average students was probably out of reach for students in the bottom quarter of the population. Anything that challenged the slower students was absurdly irrelevant for the best students.

More than a decade ago, the late Al Shanker, long-time president of the American Federation of Teachers, said there ought to be at least two levels of diploma, one for students who passed challenging tests, one for others. Some states are now hesitantly inching in that direction.

What's clear is that in California, as in many other states, legislatures and state boards are rolling back or delaying those requirements as educators discover that large percentages of students -- and not just special education students and students with limited English skills -- are on the verge of being denied diplomas.

Last month, a state-commissioned study of the California High School Exit Exam, which all students in the class of 2004 are supposed to pass to get their diplomas, found that the exam has been a major force in driving schools to improve their programs. But the study also raised the obvious question whether, in state Board of Education President Reed Hastings' careful phrasing, "all students in the class of 2004 had a reasonable opportunity to learn what they need to know \[to pass it\]."

Next month, the board will almost certainly postpone the drop-dead date, perhaps by a year, more reasonably by two, not just to prevent embarrassment and the political storm generated by high failure rates, but also to avoid the lawsuits that are almost certain to follow.

It's a familiar pattern. Some states, among them Alaska and North Carolina, have already deferred their exit exam dates; Florida and Massachusetts are moving to allow students to use scores from a variety of tests to qualify for diplomas.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Because NCLB requires the states to meet their own standards for proficiency by 2014 and to show annual progress in the meantime -- and to incur sanctions if they fail -- many states have been quietly lowering those goals.

California, which has among the highest standards, has submitted plans that defer the big annual gains students are supposed to make until after 2006 -- a sort of balloon payment due (perhaps coincidentally) after most of today's politicians are gone. Texas, Bush's great model of success, has lowered the passing score on its own test.

The obvious alternative to all this, of course, would be to calculate the needs and provide the resources to make the progress we've demanded of the schools. But that, alas, is on almost nobody's agenda.