NCSC Releases K-12 Resources from 5 Years of Systems Change Work

The National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC) is a partnership of five centers and 24 states who share the goal of ensuring that students with the most significant cognitive disabilities achieve increasingly higher academic outcomes and leave high school ready for postsecondary options. For the past five years NCSC, which is based at ICI’s National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO), has built an alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, supporting instruction aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Funded by a $45 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, NCSC’s work has resulted in an extensive collection of online resources and a wiki for educators and policymakers nationwide covering topics that have shaped the NCSC system of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. “NCSC’s work has been comprehensive, intervening in the interwoven system of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and related supports and services. Our state partners asked us, as this project comes to an end, to put the interconnected pieces into a series of briefs to describe the main ideas/parts, and we’re excited to make those and other resources available now,” says project director Rachel Quenemoen.