[Vick]

Joe - first you're making this tougher than it needs to be

second - it helps to drop the fingerpointing if you want to arrive at useful solutions

Obviously a 3rd party would have to do the testing, when I was a child we were given something called IOWA tests (I don't know if students still take these)
which would let our teachers (and parents) know our education level and how we performed against the rest of the country


Today instead of having test to measure progress we have functional literacy tests (not kidding, here in Maryland students have to pass a functional literacy test before graduating)