Georgia is one 23 states that likely will be hard-pressed to make needed improvements under the No Child Left Behind Act before the law's 2014 achievement deadline, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.
The center issued its report at the midway point of the 2002 NCLB law, which requires states to bring all students to grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014 and allows each state to set up its own track to get there.
Georgia opted for the backloaded approach, which requires less progress in the early years followed by substantially higher gains closer to the deadline.
Now, some states will need to increase the percentage of students reaching proficiency on state assessments by 10 points or more each year in the six years left to meet the NCLB goals, the report said.
"Many states may have originally set lower achievement goals for the first few years under NCLB in hopes of getting systems into place or gaining some flexibility from Washington later on," Jack Jennings, president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy, said in a statement released Tuesday. "But right now, they are still on the hook for the academic equivalent of a mortgage payment that is about to balloon far beyond their current ability to pay."
But even those states that took an incremental approach to hitting achievement targets also will face difficulties in reaching 100 percent proficiency, the report said.
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