Florida Flunks

A scandal for schools

Last October Florida's 120,000 high school juniors sat down to take a new exam: a Functional Literacy Test ordered by the state legislature to determine whether, as critics had charged, state schools had been graduating as many as 10,000 virtually illiterate seniors each year. The three-hour exam, divided into math and verbal sections, focused on students' ability to cope with such simple tasks as filling out job applications and reading labels on canned goods. The exam, said the state testing director, Thomas Fisher, was "very, very basic" --seventh-or eighth-grade level.

Yet when the results began to filter out last week, they proved truly alarming. In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, 45% of the juniors failed the math section and 14% could not handle the reading and grammar part. Only 6% of the juniors at Jacksonville's overwhelmingly black Stanton High School passed the math section.

Those who failed will be placed in remedial classes, paid for by a $10 million grant from the legislature. The remedial students will be given two more tries. Some school officials fear that a lot of the fiunkers will never pass. A number of Florida juniors apparently agree: they have fled to high schools in Georgia, which does not require students to pass a minimal competency test to graduate. qed

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