Canada’s most populous province aspires to education leadership and tends to exert influence far beyond our coast-to-coast provincial school systems. That is why the latest Ontario student assessment initiative, A Learning Province, is worth tracking and deserves much closer scrutiny. It was officially launched in September of 2017, in the wake of a well-publicized decline in provincial Math test scores and cleverly packaged as a plan to address wider professional concerns about testing and accountability.
Declining Math test scores among public elementary school students in Ontario were big news in late August 2017 for one one good reason- the Ontario Ministry’s much-touted $60-million “renewed math strategy” completely bombed when it came to alieviating the problem. On the latest round of provincial standardized tests — conducted by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) — only half of Grade 6 students met the provincial standard in math, unchanged from the previous year. In 2013, about 57 per cent of Grade 6 students met the standard Among Grade 3 students, 62 per cent met the provincial standard in math, a decrease of one percentage point since last year.
The Ontario government’s response, championed by Premier Kathleen Wynne and Education Minister Mitzie Hunter, was not only designed to change the channel, but to initiate a “student assessment review” targeting the messenger, the EQAO, and attempting to chip away at its hard-won credibility, built up over the past twenty years. While the announcement conveyed the impression of “open and authentic” consultation, the Discussion Paper made it crystal clear that the provincial agency charged with ensuring educational accountability was now under the microscope. Reading the paper and digesting the EQAO survey questions, it becomes obvious that the provincial tests are now on trial themselves, and being assessed on criteria well outside their current mandate.
Ontario’s provincial testing regime should be fair game when it comes to public scrutiny. When spending ballooned to $50 million a year in the late 1990s, taxpayers had a right to be concerned. Since 2010, EQAO costs have hovered around $34 million or $17 per student, the credibility of the test results remain widely accepted, and the testing model continues to be free of interference or manipulation. It’s working the way it was intended — to provide a regular, reasonably reliable measure of student competencies in literacy and numeracy.
The EQAO is far from perfect, but is still considered the ‘gold standard’ right across Canada. It has succeeded in providing much greater transparency, but — like other such testing regimes – has not nudged education departments far enough in the direction of improving teacher specialist qualifications or changing the curriculum to secure better student results. The Grade 10 Literacy Test remains an embarrassment. In May 2010, the EQAO report, for example, revealed that hundreds of students who failed the 2006 test were simply moved along trough the system without passing that graduation standard. Consistently, about 19 to 24 per cent of all students fall short of acceptable literacy, and 56 per cent of all Applied students, yet graduation rates have risen from 68% to 86% province-wide.
The Ontario Ministry is now ‘monkeying around’ with the EQAO and seems inclined toward either neutering the agency to weaken student performance transparency or broadening its mandate to include assessing students for “social and emotional learning’ (SEL), formerly termed “non-cognitive learning.” The “Independent Review of Assessment and Reporting” is being supervised by some familiar Ontario education names, including the usual past and present OISE insiders, Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, and Carol Campbell. It’s essentially the same Ontario-focused group, minus Dr. Avis Glaze, that populates the International Education Panel of Advisors in Scotland attempting to rescue the Scottish National Party’s faltering “Excellence for All” education reforms.
The published mandate of the Student Assessment Review gives it all away in a few critical passages. Most of the questions focus on EQAO testing and accountability and approach the tests through a “student well-being” and “diversity” lens. An “evidence-informed” review of the current model of assessment and reporting is promised, but it’s nowhere to be found in the discussion paper. Instead, we are treated to selected excerpts from official Ontario policy documents, all supporting the current political agenda, espoused in the 2014 document, Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario. The familiar four pillars, achieving excellence, ensuing equity, promoting well-being, and enhancing public confidence are repeated as secular articles of faith.
Where’s the research to support the proposed direction? The Discussion Paper does provide capsule summaries of two assessment approaches, termed “large-scale assessments” and “classroom assessments, ” but critical analysis of only the first of the two approaches. There’s no indication in A Learning Province that the reputedly independent experts recognize let alone heed the latest research pointing out the pitfalls and problems associated with Teacher Assessments (TA) or the acknowledged “failure” of Assessment for Learning (AfL). Instead, we are advised, in passing, that the Ontario Ministry has a research report, produced in August 2017, by the University of Ottawa, examining how to integrate “student well-being” into provincial K-12 assessments.
The Ontario Discussion Paper is not really about best practice in student assessment. It’s essentially based upon rather skewed research conducted in support of “broadening student assessments” rather that the latest research on what works in carrying out student assessments in the schools. Critical issues such as the “numeracy gap” now being seriously debated by leading education researchers and student assessment experts are not even addressed in the Ontario policy paper.
Educators and parents reading A Learning Province would have benefited from a full airing of the latest research on what actually works in student assessment, whether or not it conforms with provincial education dogma. Nowhere does the Ontario document recognize Dylan Wiliam’s recent pronouncement that his own creation, Assessment for Learning, has floundered because of “flawed implementation” and unwise attempts to incorporate AfL into summative assessments. Nor does the Ontario student assessment review team heed the recent findings of British assessment expert, Daisy Christodoulou. In her 2017 book, Making Good Progress, Christodoulou provides compelling research evidence to demonstrate why and how standardized assessments are not only more reliable measures, but fairer for students form unprivileged families. She also challenges nearly every assumption built into the Ontario student assessment initiative.
The latest research and best practice in student assessment cut in a direction that’s different from where the Ontario Ministry of Education appears to be heading. Christodoulou’s Making Good Progress cannot be ignored, particularly because it comes with a ringing endorsement from the architect of Assessment for Learning, Dylan Wiliam. Classroom teachers everywhere are celebrating Christodoulou for blowing the whistle on “generic skills” assessment, ‘rubric-mania,’ impenetrable verbal descriptors, and the mountains of assessment paperwork. Bad student assessment practices, she shows, lead to serious workload problems for classroom teachers. Proceeding to integrate SEL into province-wide assessments when American experts Angela Duckworth and David Scott Yeager warn that it’s premature and likely to fail is simply foolhardy. No education jurisdiction priding itself on being “A Learning Province” would plow ahead when the lights turn to amber.
The Ontario Student Assessment document, A Learning Province, may well be running high risks with public accountability for student performance. It does not really pass the sound research ‘sniff test.’ It looks very much like another Ontario provincial initiative offering a polished, but rather thinly veiled, rationale for supporting the transition away from “large-scale assessment” to “classroom assessment” and grafting unproven SEL competencies onto EQAO, running the risk of distorting its core mandate.
Where is Ontario really heading with its current Student Assessment policy initiative? Where’s the sound research to support a transition from sound, large-scale testing to broader measures that can match its reliability and provide a level playing field for all? Should Ontario be heeding leading assessment experts like Dylan Wiliam, Daisy Christodoulou, and Angela Duckworth? Is it reasonable to ask whether a Ministry of Education would benefit from removing a nagging burr in its saddle?
What gives me pause is all of the anxiety over mid level assessment when PISA shows us as world leaders and the % of Canadian with post secondary education is outstanding and pulling away on the rest of the world.
I kept looking at the list of kids who failed Literacy or math tests at the last school I worked and almost all had been in special ed for many years and/Or very poor. When teachers saw the list there was a “duh” factor.
Re-read my first paragraph. Declining trends are nothing to be proud of, or celebrate.
I don’t see how Canada can be a world leader when our assessment has been on a declining trend for years. Also the world average is dropping.
Nothing to be proud of.
Meanwhile, for all those touting Social Justice and equity by removing all standardized assessments, Daisy has a few things to say about that as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=43&v=EGxxw6sqeVg
Our PISA results are excellent and our post secondary grad rate is #1 In the world by far. This data is more important than EQAO.
Due to the discrepancy I suspect the EQAO tests are simply pitched too high.
Not that there are not ways to improve.
Destreaming will help in Ontario.
Earlier education will help in BC.
What is a “standard” for
– literacy
– numeracy
– democratic citizenship?
– etc.
How do we know?
Arguments about assessment often do not have “standards”. This confirms the idea that the history of assessment, and education in general, is a history of untested assumptions.
In health, we recognize infant mortality, life expectancy. We may not yet have something in education as useful.
Graduation rates.
Univ/college acceptance rates.
Doug,
Graduation rates and Univ/college acceptance rates. are NOT standards. They do not identify an adequate performance level.
The corporatisation of post-secondary these days is based on $$$$$. The extent to which this is so (not to mention cram schools at the high school level and beyond) obscures any effort at “standards”. In the US we often think of the common practice in Ivy League Schools of giving children of graduates an advantage so that they obtain “a gentleman’s C”. SATs in the US came about in part to solve the problem that teacher bias allowed upper-class people to graduate high school. Teacher bias (and we have done quality research on this) is still an issue. It is ironic that a “progressive measure” like SATs got oversold and quickly reached its limits.
I believe we need a rough audit of how we are doing. So do most parents. Trouble is, we need to know why the scores and what to do to improve them.
“Don’t matter how often you weigh the pig, ain’t gonna grow without good food.”
I really doubt anybody is going to create any new standard. Standardized testing is on life support. NZ largely pulling out . Becoming far less popular because it was oversold and underperformed.
That leaves us choosing from what we already have.
they’re only pulling out because teacher unions are pushing for it. NZ has seen the worst performance of their students in decades. Nations that do well are fine with having them, as were Canadian provinces when our performance was much stronger. Unions discourage standardized testing when scrutiny is warranted due to declining academic performance. And we already have empirical data from the OECD which illustrates how those nations/provinces benefit when standardized testing is implemented.
A rough audit needs to look at every aspect of the education system in Ontario. John is right that post-secondary acceptance rates is not a valid measure of the success of the elementary and secondary systems.
People like to pick and choose the areas that they want to explain the decline in test scores. Once again, people will engage in a conversation about whole language and discovery math. But, the conversation may need to expand further and look into all areas that impact the education of our children. There is less conversation about the explosion in French Immersion and Inclusion Models of education. Both of these areas have increased, coincidentally, at a time when scores have declined. Do we also need to look at social promotion over failing a grade and our criteria for giving students an Individual Education Plan?
Parent choice is another issue with education. Parents want and should have input into the choices they make for their children. But at the same time, what responsibilities and limitations should exist to create a balance between parent choice and improvements in the test scores? While Ontario explores its declining test scores, there is also a look into violence in the schools by students going on in the province.
matt we already HAVE data which illustrates why these kids’ academic performance is on the decline – see TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA and OECD data. One only needs to examine it. FI is nowhere to be found as a measure of why kids are declining.
People in education call Canada the Finland of the western hemisphere. Instead of picking holes, they come to see why things are so much better here than anywhere else. To radically improve IMHO :
Destream Ontario 44% of Canada, like BC
Realign Ontario math along Quebec lines itinerant math specialists grade 1-8. Memorization of mutiplication tables.
Complete all day K-JK with wrap around childcare 6AM – 6:30 PM
Free dental care and vision care for the poor.
Coop grocery stores in poor areas whole foods only
Free college tuition for all now with no means test and slowly reduce university tuition.
BTW this is all free because the cost of crime, indulgence, welfare, EI, and so forth drops at the same time.
It’s also foolhardy to be pulling out provincial exams which seems to be the trend as well. This is just plain silly and there is zero empirical evidence that supports how this will benefit in successful outcomes (PS it’s already been tried in other provinces and states. Failed terribly). How do parents and other edu stakeholders have any assurance that their kids are learning anything meaningful and will remain competitive globally if there are no measurable standards to compare them to across the province?
That the tests are “meaningful” and link to “global competitiveness” are assumptions only and not really verified. I did a short history of their development above. Mind you, they do, in the eyes of parents, seem better than arbitrary teaching grading- sorry Doug, they ain’t going away soon.
Can we design meaningful standards? Likely but we would need years to try them out. And in the case of some KEY learnings like
– respect for difference
– civility
– social responsibility
– civic responsibility and competence
we might see results until people live through adulthood
Like Aristotle’s view of happiness. You may not know until you summarize your life near its end.
We might NOT see results until people live through adulthood
Next step in Ontario random testing. End of every student testing.
To quote former head of Harvard grad school of education Vito Perrone
“Standardized tests don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know”.
Tests become less popular every year as everybody notices that they have no effect on results.