State assessment leaders are concerned about the challenges with receiving full approval from the U.S. Department of Education (USED) when using the ACT or the SAT as their assessment of high school achievement. USED has asked states opting to use the ACT or the SAT as the achievement indicator under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to address gaps in alignment between their chosen test and their state academic content standards. However, under the current peer review criteria, it does not appear that those gaps can be addressed without considerable modification to or augmentation of the ACT and SAT and/or revision of state academic content standards. In this paper, the author makes the case that it is necessary to move beyond current peer review requirements to resolve this issue. The author proposes that peer review guidelines be amended to constrain the criteria for judging the degree to which a nationally recognized high school academic assessment meets the federal requirements for use as an achievement indicator.