A major issue facing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing Assessment is its relationship with the most frequently encountered measurement practices among State Education Agencies (SEAs) and Local Education Agencies (LEAs). Should NAEP conduct its assessments in a fashion that represents how things should be, or reflect the status of how things really are in the nation's schools? Clearly, at some point the debate must be resolved so that program planning can move forward. The predominant method of scoring writing within NAEP is Primary Trait. Most state and local assessments do not use trait scoring. States with well developed writing programs use either focused holistic or analytic scoring, or a combination of the two. NAEP scoring might better reflect an appropriate practice by addressing factors such as: (1) the identification of elements of composition that are desirable given current practice and curricular/instructional direction among the state and local education agencies; (2) the desirable mix of text level and sentence level elements; (3) the applicability of the scoring criteria at the classroom level; (4) the applicability of the scoring criteria across grades; (5) the level of competence elicited by the criteria; and (6) the composition of the group that determines the scoring criteria and rater quality. (GDC)