The United States lacks uniform popular definitions of "literacy," remediations, or consensus for national standards. Factors beyond the control of educational and political structures continually modify and dominate discussions of illiteracy and strategies of remediation. In most advanced cultures, alienation and functional illiteracy…

The pattern toward an increase in the number of states using some form of competency testing prior to the certification of educators is substantiated in this paper. Competency testing programs are implemented at three distinct levels: (1) before entrance into a teacher education program near the end of the sophomore year in college; (2) at the end…