The Council of Chief State School Officers has raised some issues pertinent to the implementation of a national project to collect statistical indicators of academic achievement and to compare them across states. The United States Department of Education shares this concern, with an emphasis on sampling schools for a school level analysis which may be aggregated to the state level. Three issues raised by the Chiefs include the identification of subject matter domains for assessment, the scale for analysis and reporting of results, and the administration and standardization of testing across the states. Potential problems with national testing include the following: (1) redirection of state or local curriculum goals; (2) high costs of a better method of cross-state comparisons than the current Wall Chart; (3) separating the effects of student differences from curriculum or teaching effects; (4) difficulty in making useful conclusions from long-term testing; (5) conflict between state and local data indicators; (6) selection of a model which does not restrict data collection and analysis; and (7) practical implementation problems. Testing programs in five Northwestern states are briefly summarized: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Montana has no state testing program. (GDC)