The Functional Literacy Test: Florida's Approach to Competency Testing.

New minimum high school graduation standards were mandated for 1978-79 graduates, by Florida's Educational Accountability Act of 1976. Requirements included mastery of basic skills, completion of minimum course credits, and satisfactory performance on functional literacy tests. The literacy test was the primary criterion for graduation. On its first administration in Fall, 1977, 92% of Florida's eleventh graders passed the communications skills tests and 64% passed the mathematics test; in 1978, these figures were 97% and 74%. In August, 1978, the State Board of Education changed the scoring procedure and renamed the tests. The Basic Skills Tests became the State Student Assessment Test, Part I (SSAT-I), and the Functional Literacy Test became the SSAT, Part II, (SSAT-II). Because the SSAT-II appeared to violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, a district court in July 1979, ordered suspension of the SSAT-II as a graduation requirement until the 1982-83 school year. There were charges that the test was racially and culturally biased, and that pre-test copies of test questions had been made available to students. However, Florida has continued its assessment program (without affecting graduation), as well as subsequent remediation in mathematics, reading, and writing. (Author/GDC)