Testing plays an important role in most of the contemporary school reform efforts in the United States. The Massachusetts education reform effort is no exception. Its testing vehicle is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or, as it is commonly known, the MCAS.

MCAS is a battery of tests that is given each year in each school district in Massachusetts. The MCAS is aligned with a series of curriculum frameworks developed by the state Department of Education. MCAS covers such academic subjects as math, science, and literacy skills, with more subjects to be added later. The test scores are broken down by individual student, school, and district. The scores for individual students are available to their parents, teachers, principals, and superintendents. The scores for entire schools and districts are available to the public.

The chief goal of the state's education reform initiative is to enable public school students to achieve a certain level of knowledge and skill. The Massachusetts Department of Education has established this level by setting out what students are expected to learn in each basic subject. School districts are supposed to see to it that their students learn what they are expected to learn. The purpose of the MCAS is to gauge periodically how students are doing as they try to achieve this level of knowledge and skill.

With the MCAS, the state has, for the first time in its history, an evaluation mechanism that measures how much progress students are making towards meeting established goals. At the same time, individual schools districts are urged to anticipate and complement the MCAS by developing their own parallel methods of assessing how their students are doing. Thus, the education reform effort uses assessment as a way to help all students move toward a high level of academic achievement.