Competency Testing: What Role Should Teachers of Composition Play?

Abstract

As funding for public education continues to decrease, and as complaints about the quality of public education continue to increase, state education policy makers have accelerated their efforts to establish statewide testing of students' literacy skills. The minimum competency testing movement has many vocal supporters, including back to basics advocates who demand more rigorous academic skills; accountability advocates who want more efficient, more cost-effective schools; and students (and their parents) who file educational malpractice suits against school systems which have not provided them with adequate educations.' Conspicuously absent among these groups of advocates are teachers, whose efforts seem to be directed at ignoring or at obstructing the movement.2 Yet composition teachers who have rejected minimum competency testing programs or who are still debating about them are rapidly finding their students engulfed by them as legislators and administrators extend their control over public education. At the present time, thirty-five states have already passed or are considering passing legislation which mandates statewide testing of secondary and postsecondary students' writing skills, and many school systems are beginning programs without state mandates.3 At the postsecondary level, composition teachers' involvement with minimum competency testing often consists solely of administering schoolwide placement or proficiency tests. Very few of us participate in the development of the standards used to determine college-level writing competence; even fewer are involved in the creation or the selection of the tests for our schools. At many colleges, minimum competency tests are designed by test development committees composed of testing specialists and administrators rather than of classroom teachers. Such people may create or select tests which do not correspond to the curricula or to the competencies taught or deemed important by writing teachers. Furthermore, test development committees are often hindered by severe budgetary and temporal constraints and