The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is one part of a comprehensive assessment system that is evolving in the United States. In the view of the NAEP Technical Subgroup for the National Education Goals Panel, the NAEP should be an independent, statistically rigorous longitudinal measure of educational attainment in the essential subject matters. To make the NAEP a real part of educational future improvement, the following directions are recommended: (1) alignment of NAEP frameworks and test objectives to national content standards; (2) reporting NAEP results at state and national levels; (3) quality and breadth of items and tasks in each subject matter area; (4) subject matter and grade levels roughly as in the current NAEP; (5) unambiguous and carefully defined achievement levels; (6) development of performance assessment tasks; (7) assessment in a 3-year cycle; and (8) solid research to follow up interesting information coming out of the NAEP. The NAEP must be reauthorized periodically. The state-by-state NAEP, in particular, is a temporary enhancement that will disappear without congressional action. The National Education Goals Panel can be a champion for this reauthorization. (SLD)