About the NCSC

The National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC) was a multi-state, multi-organizational consortium that was awarded a General Supervision Enhancement Grant (GSEG) in late 2010 by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of the grant was to develop an alternate assessment system and related content to assess the English Language Arts and Mathematics achievement of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. The National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) at the University of Minnesota led the partnership as the host and fiscal agent of the states and organizational partners. The NCSC state partners that participated in the spring 2015 NCSC operational assessment were: Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Idaho, Indiana, Pacific Assessment Consortium (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam), Maine, Montana, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and US Virgin Islands. At that time, additional states were members of the NCSC Consortium, representing varying levels of participation. They were: California, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wyoming. These states collaborated with the organizational partners that, in addition to NCEO, included the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA), the University of Kentucky's Human Development Institute, the College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and edCount LLC.

From its inception, the organizational partners (i.e., National Centers) component of the Consortium was designed to sunset at the end of the grant. State partners renamed the ongoing collaborative the Multi-State Alternate Assessment (MSAA), with the Arizona Department of Education as fiscal host and lead state. States that have not joined MSAA may acquire license agreements for the use of assessment components of the assessment system. All other curriculum, instruction, and professional development resources associated with the project are publicly available on the NCSC Wiki https://wiki.ncscpartners.org and the NCSC Website at http://ncscpartners.org/