Editor’s note:  The Kansas State Department of Education earlier this month released it’s 2013 School Report Card.  At first glance, it appears Kansas kids are scoring poorly compared to even a year or two ago.  But with  schools all over the country rolling out of the new Common Core and College and Career Readiness standards, the rules of the game have changed.  The tests haven’t however, and that skews the data scores are supposed to provide.  
With all the acronyms and abbreviations floating around in this bowl of alphabet soup, it’s easy to get mixed up and in the end, dump the bowl out and declare you’d rather just eat crackers.
This is part one in a three part series that should cast some light on what it all means to parents and the community.  We’ll cut through the acronyms and abbreviations, and explain how these changes will ultimately help turn out better educated young people in the future.  

 In Kansas, the results are in for the 2013 state assessment tests. Last year marked the first year for the widespread implementation of common core instruction, and this year, the standards will be fully implemented.   
Reading scores are down.  Math scores are down.  Only science scores have inched up.  This isn’t what parents and the public thought was going to happen when states began receiving the nod to exchange No Child Left Behind for other scientific, research based alternatives.  
But educators knew a year ago that results from assessment tests would have little meaning until a new assessment tool was designed and implemented.  That’s still in the works, but hopefully will be ready by spring of 2014, or in 2015 by the latest.  
The biggest change this year is the roll out of the four Annual Measurable Objectives, or AMOs.  These replace the Adequate Yearly Progress, known as AYP.  To understand the importance of this change, let’s break down the jargon into something any parent or grandparent can understand.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required every school to show all students were making progress towards a goal of every student being proficient in reading by 2014.  But it was up to each individual state to determine what “proficient” meant, though there were guidelines each state needed to follow to define it. Two of those guidelines, for example, were at least 95 percent of the students in the school and in each subgroup had to participate in testing, and reading/language arts scores were separate from math scores.  Results each year were compared to the prior year’s results to see that--you guessed it--Adequate Yearly  Progress was being made.  
When Kansas was granted an exception from the NCLBA, it would be replaced with four Annual Measurable Objectives.  This means, instead of having only one chance to pass or fail, there would be four chances.  In the old system, more focus was placed on moving students from the bottom tier to the next rung on the ladder of proficiency, and it helped a lot of kids that the act was intended to help.  But, the incentive to push high achievers to every higher rungs was lost.  The new system corrects this defect.
Not only do the AMOs measure achievement, they also measure student growth, gap reduction as well as reducing non-proficiency.  

We’ll take a look at each of these measures in the Part 2.