Standards and School Dropouts: A National Study of the Minimum Competency Test

This article reports findings from a study of minimum competency testing in American secondary schools. The analysis focuses on tests that students must pass before they receive the high school diploma, a practice reported in about half of the 50 states. We explore the effects of these tests on low achieving high school students. A particular concern is the possibility that test-failure may reduce academic aspirations and thereby that test-failure may reduce academic aspirations and thereby contribute to decisions to drop out of school.

The study is based on series of in-depth interviews with educators in selected states, and on data collected face-to-face with more than 700 high school students. In one category of findings, the reports of test coordinators, school principals, and school counselors provide consistent echoes of a conventional wisdom that has enveloped high school exit exams: the belief that required competency tests are now so rudimentary that they cannot present much of a barrier to school completion. But at the same time, these educators report with uniform consistency that they do not have specific data on our question.

In a contrasting vein of findings, the students report experiences that pose a credible challenge to this conventional wisdom. Despite a strong majority of students claiming competency testing policies to be beneficial for a variety of reasons, we found that initial test failers are significantly more likely to express doubts about their chances of completing the diploma. In a fully specified general model which predicts self-reported chances of finishing high school, failing all or part of a required exit test is a robust independent contributor to doubts about the prospects of graduating.

Implications of our findings for research, policy making, and educational practice are explored.