For more than four decades the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tracked the achievement of U.S. students in major academic subjects. This national resource is the only assessment that states and now many urban districts can look to as an objective yardstick of their performance over time, relative to national benchmarks, and compared with other jurisdictions. Less known, but complementing the NAEP assessments, is a rich collection of student, teacher and school responses to background questions that can help in understanding the context for NAEP achievement results and give insights into how to improve them. Currently, the NAEP background questions are a potentially important but largely underused national resource. The background questionnaires have been cut back over the past decade. They now cover only a small fraction of important student, teacher, and school issues and have been little used in recent NAEP reports, in contrast to the first state-level NAEP Report Cards in the early 1990s. The panel proposes building a strategy to make the NAEP background questions an important national resource for educators, policymakers, and the public. The panel sees the need to expand the scope and quality of the existing questions, move into important new areas directed by research and policy, make better use of the questions though regular publications, and improve the capacity for analysis by users around the world. Recommendations are offered in four areas: (1) Ask Important Questions; (2) Improve the Accuracy of Measures; (3) Strengthen Sampling Efficiency; and (4) Reinstitute Meaningful Analysis and Reporting. (Contains 12 exhibits and 7 footnotes.)