(Heads-up: This piece is essentially a prompt designed to increase your understanding about the common core standards recently integrated into the MCA III reading exam  administered in April 2013.  Enjoy!)

The Minnesota Department of Education has released the results of Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments taken by students during the 2012-13 academic year.  While statewide performance on math assessments stayed about the same compared to 2011-12 figures, most districts and grade levels saw a 15 to 20% drop in reading scores– a condition state officials attribute largely to the transition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative whose English standards were adopted in by Minnesota in 2010, but not required to be implemented until the 12-13 school year.  (Per data found at the link above, the relative change in performance by Mounds View District students was in line with the statewide trend.)

In case you are unfamiliar with the Common Core Initiative, here are a few resources you may find useful:

1. Minnesota math, reading scores slip, but science proficiency up slightly, as printed by TwinCities.com on 8/26/13.

2. Minnesota and the Common Core Standards, as published by the Minnesota Department of Education.

3. Common Questions About the Common Core Standards, as written by John Hakes in a blog post that has received over 6,000 page views since April, 2011.

And for the extremely wonky:

4.  An hour-long webinar  titled Reading Assessment for a New Era and the Common Core State Standards.

Not only should the drop in students’ proficiency level dispel– once and for all– any question about the Common Core Standards State Initiative for English being sufficiently rigorous, but the near uniform decrease in reading proficiency scores clearly means a new bar has been set for districts & schools to gear their reading programs toward.

One very plausible explanation for student’s fresh struggles on the reading exam is that the reading exam covers the new disciplinary contexts of History/Social Studies and Science/Technical, in addition to the more traditional (but also evolving) Literature content.

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Note: Because the math portion of the MCA’s converted to computer administration, and since the MCA’s are the diagnostic tool to which the lifting of the Graduation requirement (during the 2013 Omnibus Education Bill) applies– this post will be categorized under  campaign objectives 1, 2, and 3.

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