The comprehensive program included interventions for at-risk children, mandatory kindergarten, and more stringent graduation requirements for high school. It also advocated the increased use of computers and technology in the classroom. But the heart and soul of the initiative was the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. It provides an index of school, not individual student, performance. The performance-based assessment has both interdisciplinary and discrete subject tasks and includes sections on reading, writing, language usage, math, science, and social studies.
Students work both individually and in groups to complete different portions of the exam.
No student or group of students takes the entire six-part exam. As a component of the state's professional-development efforts, teachers help write and score the exams. 1997 Editorial Projects in Education Inc.