Establishment of the new Law and Education Center (LEC) at the Education Commission of the States is announced in this document. It notes that the LEC offers preventive legal assistance to state educational programs and that it will focus on a limited number of specific legal issues. The central topic of this initial newsletter is competency…

To help school officials avoid litigation, this newsletter examines two separate issues: student competency testing and educational choice. The authors propose objective certification--in which student achievement is described solely by objective, defensible scores--as a way to avoid the possible injury to students inherent in competency testing.…

Truth in testing, competency testing, and intelligence tests constitute the central topics of this newsletter. The authors review a report prepared by the Education Commission of the States on truth-in-testing legislation and litigation, covering recent efforts at the state and federal levels to open the testing process to public scrutiny. They…

Based on work done for the 1978 Ford Fellows in Educational Journalism Program, the document contains series of newspaper articles authored by 10 journalists on various educational topics. The 10 series titles and authors are: "Growing Up Gifted in America's Schools" (H. Collins); "Minimum Competency Testing: State Approaches" (J. Covington);…

The five articles in this journal issue are intended for use by school administrators, and provide information on how to organize effective programs for achieving student writing competency. The first article discusses the development of New York State's Preliminary and Regents Competency Tests in Writing, analyzes sample student responses to one…

The Regents Competency Testing Program has been designed to assure that all students develop adequate skills in reading comprehension, writing, and mathematics before graduation from high school in New York. This bulletin provides information on two of the program's three basic elements that contribute to the accomplishment of this goal. First,…

Tips to help persons involved with law-related education (LRE) take advantage of the current demands for educational reform are presented in this special issue, which explores how ferment for reform in education can be a boon to legal education as long as LRE educators understand the changes that are taking place and are alert to ways of making…

Commentary and advice in four legal areas are offered in this newsletter on educational law. First, the document outlines preventive legal review for public educators in four basic steps, including anticipation of legal challenges, evaluation of the challenges' legal merits, consideration of the policy issues raised by potential challenges, and…

This paper considers three areas related to the testing of minimum knowledge and skills: public policy, the nature of higher-order thinking and selected aspects of educational measurement. The discussion of public policy issues centers around an apparent dichotomy of egalitarianism and elitism in public education, schooling and the public economy,…

Standardized achievement tests are often misused as indicators of a school's quality or effectiveness relative to other schools. This is an incorrect use because it ignores variation among schools in student abilities, family support of education, student mobility, and other factors. People also misuse tests because they impute to them more…

The issue of Exceptional Education Quarterly addresses several major issues affecting the measurement of exceptionality in the schools. (SB)

The three articles in this journal issue focus on the real meaning of competency in reading and writing. The first article, "Minimums and Optimums," argues against the establishment of minimum competency tests and for an increase in instructional time. "Placement Testing: The Objective Irrelevant," the second article, maintains that the…

The seven articles in this journal issue deal with the politics and practice of teaching writing. The articles focus on the following topics: (1) efforts to establish educational accountability, including competency based teacher education, licensing of teachers, and minimum competency testing; (2) methods for teaching students to use intuition in…

The forces or pressures that have produced a concern for fundamental skills of literacy are briefly considered, and a number of related questions are raised about willingness and capabilities for dealing with the issues in a deliberative, systematic manner. A major premise is the belief that the back-to-basics movement can be understood best in…

A one-page introduction is followed by summaries of articles and documents on teacher competency testing. George F. Madaus argues that, although tests serve some useful functions, treating them as a major mechanism for reforming education is questionable. Peter A. Garcia examines the negative impact of testing on minority teachers and minorities…