A committee commissioned by Gov. Ed Rendell has been working for more than a year to figure out what's wrong with Pennsylvania's public schools and how to improve graduation standards.

It's a lofty, yet necessary, goal. Unfortunately, students graduate every year from our high schools without adequate writing and analytical skills. And that, in turn, hurts universities that accept students of all skill levels. The students who have skills are bored to tears when they must sit through simple assignments, and the students who are lacking in skills struggle.

One would think there would be an easy fix. Unfortunately, there is not.

A Pennsylvania Department of Education spokeswoman said Rendell might support an idea that would require end-of-course competency exams in public high schools, which would ensure that students have a greater understanding of subject matter.

However, what more could those do than the current Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) that are required competency exams for juniors in reading, writing and mathematics?

Time and time again, everyone has heard a teacher say that those tests are worthless.

They don't carefully examine a student's competency, and many teachers teach solely for the exam.

How many of you remember your teachers taking a few days just to go over what would be asked on the assessment exam?

Perhaps you received a practice writing prompt or reviewed a few mathematical equations.

Ring a bell?

Policy makers would have to be very careful how they implemented more testing because it might not help our educational standards.

In fact, it might hurt them.

If the state homogenizes education so that students can respond to a prompt or get through basic math, what else are these students missing?

And what is considered basic?

How can you determine what is the basic of history, for example?

Is it knowing about the Civil War or Sputnik? Sitting in a college class, a student might be expected to know both, but if the Civil War is deemed more important to get through a test, an important part of history may go by the wayside.

Should we know Shakespeare or Arthur Miller? Most high schools probably teach at the very least one Shakespeare play, but maybe not Death of a Salesman or The Crucible.

But to be well read and well educated, then maybe we should know both.

The bottomline is state officials must be cautious in their pursuit of the perfect educational standards.

We've got a lot to gain, but there's even more to lose.