Subdivision 1.Reporting requirements.

A school, school district, and charter school must administer statewide assessments under this section, as the assessments become available, to evaluate student progress toward career and college readiness in the context of the state‘s academic standards. A school, school district, or charter school may use a student’s performance on a statewide assessment as one of multiple criteria to determine grade promotion or retention. A school, school district, or charter school may use a high school student’s performance on a statewide assessment as a percentage of the student’s final grade in a course, or place a student’s assessment score on the student’s transcript.

Subd. 2.Computer adaptive assessments.

(a) Reporting of state assessment results must:

(1) provide timely, useful, and understandable information on the performance of individual students, schools, school districts, and the state;

(2) include a growth indicator of student achievement; and

(3) determine whether students have met the state’s academic standards.

(b) The 3rd through 8th grade computer-adaptive assessment results and high school test results must be available to districts for diagnostic purposes affecting student learning and district instruction and curriculum, and for establishing educational accountability. The commissioner, in consultation with the chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, must establish empirically derived benchmarks on the high school tests that reveal a trajectory toward career and college readiness consistent with section 136F.302, subdivision 1a. The commissioner must disseminate to the public the computer-adaptive assessments and high school test results upon receiving those results.

Subd. 3.Public reporting.

(a) The commissioner must include the following components in the statewide public reporting system:

(1) uniform statewide computer-adaptive assessments of all students in grades 3 through 8 and testing at the high school levels that provides appropriate, technically sound accommodations or alternate assessments;

(2) educational indicators that can be aggregated and compared across school districts and across time on a statewide basis, including consistent attendance, high school graduation rates, and high school drop-out rates by age and grade level;

(3) state results on the ACT test; and

(4) state results from participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress so that the state can benchmark its performance against the nation and other states, and, where possible, against other countries, and contribute to the national effort to monitor achievement.

(b) The commissioner shall report test results publicly and to stakeholders, including the performance achievement levels developed from students’ unweighted test scores in each tested subject and a listing of demographic factors that strongly correlate with student performance, including student homelessness, as data are available, among other factors. The test results must not include personally identifiable information as defined in 34 C.F.R. § 99.3. The commissioner shall also report data that compares performance results among school sites, school districts, Minnesota and other states, and Minnesota and other nations. The commissioner shall disseminate to schools and school districts a more comprehensive report containing testing information that meets local needs for evaluating instruction and curriculum. The commissioner shall disseminate to charter school authorizers a more comprehensive report containing testing information that contains anonymized data where cell count data are sufficient to protect student identity and that meets the authorizer’s needs in fulfilling its obligations under chapter 124E.

(c) The grades 3 through 8 computer-adaptive assessments and high school tests must be aligned with state academic standards. The commissioner must determine the testing process and the order of administration. The statewide results must be aggregated at the site and district level, consistent with subdivision 1a.