Abstract
The first of these issues results from the tendency of most school systems, legislatures, or state departments to conceive of competency testing as minimal competency testing. Competent in this case comes to mean not incompetent, but barely so, rather than skillful, capable, fully adequate. The issue that arises, of course, is what constitutes minimal competencies? It is an important question because testing programs, especially those that certify, control graduation, or influence admission to programs, exert a powerful hold on teaching, shaping both the content and the methods in the classroom. For that shaping to be beneficial, tests must concentrate upon truly important competencies and encourage attention to significant matters. David Nyberg, in a talk at the Buffalo Language Arts Conference on Competence Testing, suggested a view of the competencies of reading and writing. They are, he said,
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