Just Say " No!" (From the President)
ETFO has never supported the standardized tests administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). Your federation has been speaking out against them from the time the tests were first introduced.
Our message to the government has been clear: teachers know best how to assess the learning of the whole student. An assessment by a child’s teacher, not a score on a provincial test, is the best report card a parent can get.
As teachers we know that classroom assessment is a valuable tool for improving student learning. It is at the heart of good teaching and student learning. EQAO tests provide an artificial benchmark. They are a political tool that promotes the distorted view that large-scale testing is the only reliable measure of student achievement.
It is the unintended outcomes of the tests that are most distressing. Every teacher can tell you at least one story of the impact of test stress on both students and parents. While the ranking of students and schools has been a boon to the real estate industry, it has had a more sobering impact on many communities already challenged to deal with socioeconomic stress. The current frenzy to increase literacy and numeracy scores, while well intentioned, will ultimately lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and a lessening of opportunity for our students.
We appreciate the recent changes to the EQAO tests, made in response to lobbying by parents, ETFO, and others. Grade 3 and 6 assessments are no longer timed tests. They are now half as long as they once were, and are administered later in the school year. Schools receive the test results earlier in the subsequent school year, making them slightly more useful as diagnostic tools. The EQAO reports include more contextual data, and the agency itself has lobbied newspapers not to publish school rankings.
Nevertheless, we are more convinced each year that the funds spent on the testing infrastructure – the costs of creating, administering, and marking the tests – would be better spent supporting students and teachers in the classroom.
As it does every year, EQAO will soon be advertising for people to mark its tests. Your federation does not want you to become involved. Your participation as a marker lends credibility to the testing regime and all that it implies. It undermines the teaching profession and reinforces the notion that teachers cannot be relied on to do their jobs and properly assess their own students. It suggests that the shortcomings of Ontario’s education system lie at the feet of teachers rather than being the result of the roller coaster of government ideology and funding.
We are calling on all of our members to help us relay the message to government that standardized testing wastes precious classroom time and scarce resources.
When the EQAO issues its advertisement for markers elementary teachers should just say “No!”