Schemes for assessing reading achievement with specific tests have been in use since early in this century. The two driving forces behind the testing movement--scientific objectivity and compulsory education--blossomed in the 1920s and 1930s and continued substantially unchanged through most of the 1960s. In the early 1970s, the idea of mastery learning (hold achievement constant and allow instruction to vary) was introduced and developed in the form of highly skill-specific, criterion-referenced tests. Generally, instructional variation consisted of varying the amount of workbook or worksheet practice designed to help students pass mastery skills tests. Since the late 1970s, states have shifted their concern to instruction and program assessment. In the early 1980s, the Report of the Commission on Reading caused an increase in comprehensive state-mandated testing programs (SMTP). The major threat of these programs is curriculum reductionism, which teachers might respond to by (1) not organizing classroom time around "teaching to the test"; (2) learning more about the process for revising SMTP; (3) interpreting SMTP results cautiously because they are generally not an accurate index of an individual's progress; and (4) evaluating children's reading competency using measures that approximate real reading. (JD)