The All-Aboard Campaign aims to reduce the discriminatory practice of tracking certain students with disabilities off of the general curriculum and into “life skills”- based instruction where they are subjected to drastically lower expectations, taught and tested based on vastly lower standards, and denied the opportunity to graduate with a regular high school diploma. Instead of participating in the “regular” MCAS test that seeks to measure student mastery of state standards, these students are assigned to take the MCAS-Alt, which assesses them based on different, lower achievement standards. Statewide, English learners (1.6 times), African American students (1.6 times), Hispanic / Latino students (~2 times), male students (~2 times), and students from low-income students (2.5 times) are all disproportionately more likely to be tracked onto this low achievement track than their peers. CLE’s campaign to address this injustice focuses on: (1) training parents, advocates, and attorneys to be effective change-agents for students (2) exploring avenues to dismantle discriminatory policies and practices, including by working collaboratively with educators and schools so that they can better understand how to appropriately use alternate assessments, (3) representing students with disabilities who are being inappropriately taught to standards well below grade-level due to their current or former placement on the MCAS-Alt, and (4) ensuring schools have the systems in place to accelerate student learning and support students removed from the MCAS-Alt to succeed in the higher-expectation regular programs.
