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What the flood of Minnesota test score results mean

Third-grade classroom
Teacher Arlene Lebowitz assists a student in her third-grade class during summer school July 2, 2003.
Tim Boyle/Getty Images

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Minnesota's education department released new scores from the state's MCA standardized test on Tuesday. Last week, a new data set looked at how students did on the ACT. And more data will be released in October on school performance. On top of that, parents will soon receive information from their children's schools with even more information.

With so much data available and so many numbers flying around, what's a parent or teacher or interested member of the public to do?

Kent Pekel, president and CEO of the Search Institute in Minneapolis, has spent years in education worrying about and studying numbers like these. He joins The Daily Circuit to tell us what these numbers do and don't tell us, and how we should digest them when they're released.