FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                              Contact: Sarah Nathan
Feb. 2, 2001                                                                             phone: (617) 227-8260
    

MASS AFL-CIO TAKES A POSITION ON MCAS
TEST SHOULD BE ONE OF MANY ASSESSMENT TOOLS 

Brewster, MA  - Wrapping up a three-day planning conference, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Executive Council took a position this week calling on the state Department of Education to expand the assessment tools used to evaluate individual students and schools beyond the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

The 65-member Executive Council unanimously voted in opposition to using the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as the “sole basis” for determining a student or school’s success rate. The vote was taken at the Mass AFL-CIO’s State of the Union conference, an annual planning meeting for statewide labor leaders to outline the coming year’s agenda, held last week on Cape Cod.

“We are not opposed to assessment tests, but in opposition to the MCAS test as the only test,” Mass AFL-CIO President Robert J. Haynes said. “One test cannot give a comprehensive assessment of a student’s abilities or a school’s success.”

The new Mass AFL-CIO policy states: “We are opposed to requiring that students pass a lengthy, statewide standardized test as a necessary condition of being awarded a high school diploma. We are also opposed to judging the educational effectiveness of our schools solely on the average scores achieved on one test.”

The policy statement is rooted in the state’s 1993 Educational Reform Act that states: “The system shall employ a variety of assessments.”

“This is an issue of extreme importance to working families,” said Richard Courtney, a Northampton resident who is a member of both the Mass AFL-CIO Executive Council and Education Committee. “By using only one tool to assess our children’s worth, we are setting them up for failure.”

 Courtney, who has a daughter, Elyse, in the tenth grade at Northampton High School, spent the last several months researching the state AFL-CIO’s position on MCAS.

 The Massachusetts AFL-CIO is the umbrella organization for labor unions in the Commonwealth and the voice of 400,000 working men and women in Massachusetts.

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