Earlier this year, 11 organizations and 2 community leaders—including Education Reform Now Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Educators for Excellence-Boston, Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, National Parents Union and Teach Plus—came together to form the Voices for Academic Equity Coalition to change the narrative on annual, summative assessments in Massachusetts. The statewide assessment is the only objective measure for educators, families and policymakers to know where students are excelling and where they need additional support to meet grade level expectations. In the face of a potential ballot initiative aimed at removing the assessments as a graduation requirement, the coalition released a report and hosted a webinar detailing the value of the state test (the MCAS) and provided eight recommendations for how the state could improve the assessment to mitigate challenges and make it a more effective tool for all stakeholders. The recommendations received coverage in 13 outlets across the state, igniting a pro-equity perspective that had largely been missing. As the Boston Globe noted, “This coalition understands the value the MCAS brings as a uniform statewide standard of assessment but wants to make the test less intimidating for students, even while rendering their MCAS results a more timely tool for helping individual students.” Since the report was issued, we anticipate that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education — in its RFR for a new test vendor — will include one or more of the committee’s recommendations. The coalition members will continue their partnership beyond the MCAS, with the MassCore Standards as their next area of focus.