It is important to note that this is a relative change. I didn't read the description properly and couldn't figure out why setting proc_nice(0) didn't take the forked children back to 0!
For example if you run:
<?php
proc_nice(-5);
proc_nice(0); proc_nice(5); ?>
In PHP CLI under Debian (and probably many other Linux flavours) you can read the 'niceness' from the proc filesystem. (There may be a PHP command that gives this info but there doesn't seem to be a link to it on this page.)
E.g
<?php
$Current_Niceness_Value = intval(explode(" ",file_get_contents("/proc/".getmypid()."/stat"))[18]);
$Current_Niceness_Value = unpack("l",pack("L",intval(explode(" ",file_get_contents("/proc/".getmypid()."/stat"))[18])))[1];
?>