Competency Tests

Report Outline
Setting Academic Standards
Modern Educational Testing
Future of Competency Tests
Special Focus

Setting Academic Standards

Alarm Over Quality of U.S. Education

Parents, educators and employers have voiced new concerns about the quality of American education in the last several years. The worry is that elementary and secondary schools are turning out increasing numbers of high school graduates who are weak in the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Declining test scores on national and state examinations since the mid-1960s also have prompted questions about the nation's educational system. Last year, a Gallup Poll indicated that many American adults have serious doubts about the quality of American education. Parents nationwide have complained that while education costs are rising, the quality of education is sinking. “Generally, we seem to have seen a nationwide academic achievement decline,” author Frank E. Armbruster wrote last year after studying scores on academic achievement tests given to all grades in most states.

One reaction to this perceived decline has been the movement toward returning to traditional methods of teaching. And one offshoot of the trend back to basics is the adoption by many states of standardized, mandatory minimal competency tests, especially as requirements for high school graduation. Edward B. Fiske Jr., education editor of The New York Times, wrote April 19 that the setting of minimal academic standards in the form of competency tests is “perhaps the most powerful movement in American public education.”

Since 1975, 34 states have established programs that require some form of minimal competency testing, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit organization that promotes cooperation among state and federal government leaders in education. The movement by state legislatures and boards of education to establish minimal competency tests in elementary and secondary schools has been called “one of the most explosive issues on the education scene today” by the Education Commission's research and information director, Russell B. Vlaanderen.