Traditional measures of teachers' competency have been widely criticized for their lack of authenticity and predictive validity. There is little evidence regarding the technical soundness of traditional teacher licensure tests and little research documenting the validity of such tests for identifying competent teachers or effective teaching. Growing evidence indicates that performance assessments better evaluate instructional practices than these traditional assessments and that performance assessments can serve as valuable professional learning experiences. Performance assessments allow for the evaluation of both the process used in solving a task and the product itself and include evidence from actual teaching practice to potentially provide direct rather than inferred evaluation of teaching ability. In 1998 California passed Senate Bill (SB) 2042 requiring teacher candidates to successfully complete a teacher performance assessment (TPA) prior to obtaining a preliminary teaching credential, and in July 2008, SB 1209 put the law into effect. Programs in California had two options: (1) use the TPA designed for the state by the Educational Testing Service; or (2) develop their own. To date, only two such alternative assessments have been approved for use: (1) the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) developed by a consortium of pre-service teacher preparation programs; and (2) the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers (FAST), the only locally designed Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) approved assessment system. This article describes the development and implementation of FAST. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)