Case Study: Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) achieves a fair, actionable school-quality dashboard beyond standardized tests with VMware Tanzu

Measuring School Quality Beyond Standardized Test Results

The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) is a partnership of eight Massachusetts public school districts and teacher unions that set out to move beyond narrow, often biased standardized tests that misrepresent student learning and drive inequitable consequences. MCIEA needed a fairer, more comprehensive way to measure school quality, close opportunity gaps, and provide useful data for educators and communities.

Partnering with VMware Tanzu Act, MCIEA developed an evidence-based School Quality Measures framework and a user-friendly dashboard that combines student and teacher surveys and administrative data from about 200 schools into five performance categories (teachers & leadership, culture, resources, academic learning, and community & well‑being). The stakeholder-driven tool makes school performance more actionable, is being expanded and operationalized for wider use, and has already drawn interest from other districts seeking alternatives to test-score–only accountability.

MCIEA

Peter Piazza

Project Director