The No Child Left Behind Act requires standards-based accountability for school districts and schools receiving Title I funds. A major component of this policy is to report whether districts and schools are making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) based on their performance goals. This paper raises questions for rural schools using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics scores from 35 states and state student assessment results from Maine between 1992 and 1996. Assuming the nation's rural students will make the same amount of gain every 4 years as they did between 1992 and 1996, the number of rural students at or above proficient in mathematics will rise to 53 percent by 2014, indicating that the AYP goal is not feasible. Overall statewide academic improvement in Maine was approximately 2 times larger using the state assessment than with the NAEP assessment. That the assessment used can make such a large difference raises questions of validity. Because smaller sample sizes inherently produce unreliable scores, the successive cohort comparison is highly unreliable as a measure of academic progress in small rural schools. By setting a uniform AYP target for every school, the current formula does not consider the influence of schools' initial performance status on their chance to meet the target, which brings the fairness of the AYP into question. Recommendations include lowering the target achievement level or extending the timeline to reach the level for disadvantaged schools, allowing the use of multiple measures to demonstrate school progress, using rolling averages to stabilize performance variations, and allowing individualized AYP targets according to baseline performance levels. (Contains 19 references.) (TD)