Brookline, MA, Town Meeting, approved
November 15, 2000, by vote of 175-10

 Resolution under Article 22, as proposed by the Board of Selectmen

 VOTED: To adopt the following resolution and authorize and request that the Board of Selectmen send copies of the same to each elected officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to each member of its Great and General Court, and to each Board of Selectmen, Town Administrator, Mayor and School Committee of all towns and cities within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

 WHEREAS the Town of Brookline fully supports the objectives of providing adequate funding of education for students in all communities and of ensuring that public education is of high quality, and recognizes the right of the people of Massachusetts to ensure that state and local funds for education are used efficiently,

 AND WHEREAS judging or evaluating school systems solely or primarily on the basis of their students’ performance on MCAS may encourage school committees, administrators and teachers to place undue emphasis on preparing students for the tests and insufficient emphasis on other aspects of education such as research skills, perseverance, and other cognitive and noncognitive skills not easily measured in a standard test environment,

 AND WHEREAS the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), produced by the Massachusetts Department of Education and Board of Education, is a testing system apparently designed for “certificates of mastery” rather than for use in “competency determination,” as required for high school graduation by the Education Reform Act of 1993,

 AND WHEREAS no single test is an adequate measure of student performance,

 AND WHEREAS use of MCAS as a sole measure of school performance fails to satisfy provisions of the Education Reform Act calling for a “variety of assessment instruments,” including “consideration of work samples, projects and portfolios,” facilitating “authentic and direct gauges of student performance,” and providing a “means to compare student performance” with “students in other states and in other nations,”

 AND WHEREAS the Department of Education and Board of Education have ignored or discounted the harmful consequences of their actions, threatening to deny high school diplomas to a majority of the students in the Commonwealth and disregarding the circumstances of the many students who face specific linguistic and learning challenges,

 NOW THEREFORE, the Town of Brookline calls on the Great and General Court to repeal or suspend the graduation requirement of the Education Reform Act until a system of assessments has been developed and fully validated that satisfies all provisions of the Education Reform Act, and that focuses on competence in language and mathematics at levels which will be meaningful for all high school graduates,

 AND FURTHERMORE, the Town of Brookline calls on the Great and General Court to convene hearings on the implementation of the assessment provisions of the Education Reform Act.