More than one of every five schools in Utah failed this year to meet testing goals under No Child Left Behind, according to results released Monday.

This year, 201 Utah schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward the goals of the federal education law, up from 125 last year. Some say the increase is the inevitable result of a system that demands more from schools each year. Others blame budget cuts in Utah, which already has the lowest per-pupil spending in the nation.

Buck Ekstrom, principal at King Elementary in Layton, said expanding class sizes and a large number of kids moving each year are some of the main challenges at his school, which did not make AYP this year. The Davis School District increased class sizes over the past two years in response to budget shortfalls.

“It makes a huge impact because there are less teachers to go around to all the different students,” Ekstrom said, noting that the school also does not get federal Title I money like many other schools serving students from low-income families. “We’re lowest in spending, and we have average test scores for the nation, but what could we be? We could be leading the nation in test scores.”

Across the Davis District, more than twice as many schools — 18 — missed making AYP this year compared with last.

More than twice as many Granite schools — 35 — also failed to make AYP this year compared with last.

Darryl Thomas, Granite District director of research, assessment and evaluation, said many Granite schools faced hurdles when it came to language arts. In fact, many schools statewide faced that same hurdle, with 84 percent of elementary and middle schools that failed to make AYP failing only because of language arts. To make AYP each year, schools must make sure certain percentages of their students test at grade level in math and language arts in each of many ethnic, ability and income groups and that certain percentages of students take state tests.

Thomas said he suspects the combination of factors played a role in Granite’s results: losing district language arts specialists due to cutbacks as the district started using a new reading textbook; increasing numbers of students learning English; and the removal of a listening section from the state language arts test.

He also said, however, that it’s inevitable that fewer schools will meet goals as time passes and those goals get loftier. Under NCLB, higher and higher percentages of students are supposed to test on-grade level in math and language arts over time until 100 percent of students hit that mark in 2014.

This past spring, 83 percent of students had to test proficient in language arts and 45 percent had to test proficient in math for elementary and middle schools to make AYP. For high schools to make AYP, 82 percent of tenth-graders had to test proficient in language arts and 40 percent of students had to test proficient on certain math tests. Those targets are the same as in the previous year, but will go up again this school year.

“Schools are certainly concerned because we’re putting in more and more effort to try and tread water, as it were, because the rules are changing on us,” Thomas said.

Though state proficiency targets didn’t change this year compared with last, John Jesse, director of assessment and accountability at the state Office of Education, said it’s possible more schools failed to make AYP this year because it’s getting more difficult to make AYP under a provision known as “safe harbor.” Under safe harbor, schools can make AYP, even if they don’t hit testing targets, by reducing the percentage of students not proficient in certain groups over the previous year by 10 percent while also hitting certain attendance or graduation targets. That, Jesse said, can become more difficult over time as more and more students score proficient.

And some schools this year made AYP not necessarily by hitting testing goals, but by appealing their results. In all, 98 Utah schools made AYP only after appealing their status, including a chunk of schools that didn’t test well enough to make AYP because of statewide computer glitches during the administration of the tests, Jesse said.

But not all the AYP news released Monday was bad. More Utah schools than ever — eight — tested well enough to escape federal sanctions they had been facing for failing to meet goals in the past. Only schools that receive Title I dollars for serving low-income students can face sanctions for failing to make AYP.

And statewide, 79 percent of Utah’s roughly 1,000 schools rose to the challenge, making AYP.

That included Granite’s Wright Elementary School in West Valley City, which made AYP for the first time in three years, partly by making safe harbor in language arts.