No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students in grades 3 through 8, in each racial, ethnic, and socio-economic group, and whether they have special needs or are native English speakers, to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. This is widely understood to be unattainable, but educators and policy makers are insufficiently aware of the causes of our looming failure. Many of the law's supporters believe that the goal of 'proficiency for all' can't be reached primarily because there is too little time between now and 2014 for schools to improve sufficiently, and that the problem can be fixed by making the deadline more distant to allow more time to improve. For this symposium, we have been asked to consider whether such a goal can be reached; if so, how long it might take if, in fact, 2014 is too soon; and if the goal is unattainable no matter how distant, how we might establish more reasonable school goals for narrowing the achievement gap and raising the achievement of all children.