The federal government is permitting many schools to escape accountability for the progress of racial or ethnic subgroups under the No Child Left Behind Act, according to a computer analysis released by the Associated Press (AP) the week of April 17, 2006. Under the law, signed by President Bush in 2002, schools must meet annual performance goals for their student populations as a whole and for specific groups of students. Those groups include racial and ethnic minorities and students who are from low-income families, speak limited English, or have disabilities--as long as enough students in each category meet minimum group sizes set by each state and approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Schools receiving federal Title I aid that miss the targets, known as adequate yearly progress or AYP, for two or more years are subject to increasingly serious consequences. But according to the AP's analysis, the minimum group, or "N" sizes set in many states are so large that schools are not being held accountable for the subgroup performance of some 1.9 million students who fall into various racial or ethnic categories in calculations of AYP.