
          Testing for Competency
          By Dixon, HortenseHortense Dixon
          Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 20-22
          
          Twenty-one states now base teacher certification on the results of
competency tests. These tests measure what is considered to be "basic
knowledge" appropriate for the eighth grade level. At the same time,
an increasing number of states and metropolitan school districts are
requiring the passing of a standardized test as a requirement for
receiving a high_school diploma. Those who fail the test will receive
either a certificate of attendance or a diploma noting recipients'
deficiencies in basic skills.
          In the city where I live, the Houston Independent School District
recently adopted competency testing for all currently certified
teachers and standardized testing in all subjects in grades nine
through twelve with the passing grade for the subject determined by
the standardized test results. The Texas State Board of Education has
conducted hearings on major curriculum changes that would require more
time on the study of science, math and English. The President of the
United_States has placed his stamp of approval on a "return to the
basics."
          The national search to discover what has gone wrong with our
schools has drawn a tiny circle around teachers, students and
standardized test results. This search seeks the comfort zone of an
earlier time in a simplistic return to the tree it's. Such a tightly
drawn circle zeros in on minimal considerations of what knowledge
teachers and students must have today and on the least powerful tools
for learning.
          Of course teachers and graduates must be capable of reading,
writing and computing. But they must also be excellent in
comprehending what they read, of analyzing what they hear, of
synthesizing new and old information and of judging what is of
immediate and what is of long-term value. It is only within a large
circle of interpretation that we can make sense of ourselves and of
the people and events that are moving us into the twenty-first
century.
          We are in the midst of a transformation from an industrially
oriented society to a society of high-tech, information and
education. An historical shift as significant as that from an
agricultural to an industrial society is underway. As individuals and
groups within American society grapple with the shape, direction and
speed of this transformation, the educational system reflects the
current fuzzy state of misunderstanding.
          Teachers and school administrators, trained for what used to be,
are caught between the demands of an educational program designed for
the industrial society that is passing and the fuzzy and contentious
terrain of emerging patterns of leisure and work.
          Sources of information are stratified by special 

interest,
fragmented and frequently without conceptual frameworks and
disseminated in a variety of media and modes. Learning occurs in many
settings outside the classroom and in a highly informal fashion. Our
children know about things that their parents and teachers know and
understand least. They know more about outer space, ecology, drugs,
electronics, computers and the criminal justice system than most
adults. They question and challenge the contradictions and paradoxes
that their parents and teachers have been taught to accept or
dismiss. Teaching them is much more complex than ever before.
          Our children have knowledge in areas with which the school has not
been historically concerned. Much of their knowledge is attuned to the
emerging society. While the educational system enforces the old
curriculum, young_people are already looking beyond the schools trying
to figure out a way to satisfy their interests and needs. Educators
continue to teach and test for the simpler skills of an older
day. Alarmed, they think competence can be attained by getting tougher
and by adding on more years of the same old thing.
          Parents, both literate and illiterate, find their education,
knowledge and skills useless and obsolete as they are "laid-off,"
never to be recalled to what they believed to be their life's work in
industrial society. They, too, know that their education no longer
serves them well. No wonder that they wonder about their children's
education, still very similar to their own.
          Why don't our children learn to read? Is it because they receive
most of their information from sources other than books and printed
material? Is it because what we teach them to read is out of touch
with the world as they know it? Is is because they learn twice as much
from what they see and hear than from what they read? The answers to
these questions will not come through competency testing or stratified
diplomas.
          We did not discover in 1970 or 1980 that "Johnny could not read."
It was posed as a question in the 1950s. The most significant answer
then, as it is today, concerned the relationship between poverty and
learning. We know today, just as we knew then, of the destructive
effects of socioeconomic deprivation into which many children are born
and continue to live. These findings. which require drawing the larger
circle, have yet to be integrated into discussions of educational
policy.
          Other answers, learned in the 1950s and still outside the circle,
showed the importance of caring teachers and of the attention given to
developing self-concepts and creative adaptations of the curriculum
linked to the child's experiences and exposures. Another fifties"
lesson taught us that the expectations of teachers have more to do
with students" performance than do IQ scores.
          How do we measure a teacher's skills in helping students from
impoverished backgrounds overcome their circumstances? Can such
learning be measured by a standardized test? Or such teachers by a
competency test?
          How do we measure the important role that many black colleges and
universities have played in educating black youngsters even while
these institutions themselves suffered under discriminatory
circumstances? Given this history, what are we to make of the fact
that five black colleges in Alabama had the lowest pass rates on the
Alabama teacher competency test--with percentages ranging from zero to
sixty-five--while the white schools' pass rate clustered in the
eighties and nineties with only four falling below seventy-five
percent. Such figures raise serious questions about the competency
test used, its design and standardized process, the selection criteria
and cultural bias.
          Such test results also demonstrate how blacks may be more adversely
affected by the competency testing movement. The number of black
teachers in the South may be reduced at a time when more and more
education is required if students are to have hopes for a satisfying
future. If there are fewer black teachers, we can expect fewer black
students to persist. For we have also recently learned that a major
factor associated with the completion rate of students is whether or
not there are teachers who are like them, teachers with whom they can
identify. Still another generation of under-educated and uneducated
blacks stand on the edge of perpetuating a black underclass.
          But there is a further failing with regard to competency
testing. What the testers are satisfied with--a narrowly conceived
"body of knowledge" known as eighth grade competence--gives a false
impression to teachers, parents and students that such minimal skills,
and these precise ones, are sufficient for "success" in
society. Actually, these skills will prepare students to fill some
600,000 new janitor and sexton jobs or 800,000 new fast food and
kitchen helper jobs whose low pay and un-unioned status represent the
foundation of exploitation upon which the economic inequalities of the
South will be perpetuated. Another generation of cheap and contented
labor?
          As the movement toward standardized testing and "basics" teaching
sweeps the South we must see it in relation to this section's old
habits and tendencies. We must raise, even if we cannot yet answer,
some familiar sounding questions. Is the racial dilemma that has
dominated educational decision-making in the South since the Brown
decision intertwined in the standardized competency testing movement?
Is the historical use of education as a political power chess board
and a tool of disenfranchisement flying under a new banner? Is the
love affair of Southern elites with economic structures that preserve
inequalities undergirding this movement? Are we, in the rush to
simple-minded basics, about to position the South for the back-end
rather than the front-end of the economic, social and cultural
revolution that is already underway?
          A new society is unfolding in America and in the South. Its key
lies in learning how to learn. In requires 

greater attention to an
expenditures for education than we have ever committed. It requires,
if we are to honor our pledge toward the promotion of equality, the
pursuit of public policy not private advantage.
          As we work toward the creation of a just society in the South, we
must be sure that what we teach is of value and that how we teach
fosters an unquenchable desire to learn. Competency testing does
neither.
          
            Hortense Dixon is profesor of home economics at Texas
Southern University and serves on the executive committee of the
Southern_Regional_Council.
          
        
