Georgia Straight Newspaper

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Section: Georgia Straight - News Features

Written by Pieta Woolley

Vancouver mom Gwen Giesbrecht doesn’t blame teachers for poor Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) results. As the chair of the District Parent Advisory Council, she knows that some educators are asked to do the impossible, and with little support.

“We should be concerned when a school places poorly, but not because of teacher performance,” she told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “We should be concerned about the social situation in the classroom, if a teacher has 50 percent of kids on income assistance, 10 percent in care, and 40 percent ESL. If we’re then asking, ‘Why are the teachers doing such a bad job?’ that’s not an effective means of assessment. We should be looking at the idea that teachers are doing an insurmountable job.”

At least Giesbrecht thinks that’s what’s going on. But how B.C. reports its FSA results means no one knows exactly where the hot spots are—and so legislators cannot be held accountable. That’s according to Dan Laitsch, an assistant education professor at Simon Fraser University who researches educational assessments.

Here, he said, students are simply tested by school. South of the border, results for black students, Hispanic students, white students, low-income students, and other groups are broken out. Although it’s not necessarily an approach that Laitsch promotes, he notes that it can lead to a healthy, vigorous two-way accountability flow between schools and politicians that sometimes includes courts.

For example, when standardized tests in Washington state showed that many students were failing to read and do math proficiently, a coalition of parents and school districts sued the government. In McCleary v. State, filed on January 11, 2007, the coalition used the results from tests—like B.C.’s FSA tests, written this year by grades 4 and 7 students February 2 to 27—to prove the state wasn’t funding schools adequately. Although Washington’s most recent case is still before the courts, legal cases have been fought in 45 other states.

That confrontation—and rigorous debate—doesn’t happen here, Laitsch said.

“The [B.C.] conversation around school testing tends to be very superficial,” he told the Straight. Indeed, much of this year’s media focused on the B.C. Teachers’ Federation vote to boycott the FSAs, followed by the Labour Relations Board order that teachers administer the tests. There was also talk about the Fraser Institute’s 2008 “report card” on elementary schools, published in the Vancouver Sun on February 7. “It’s like everyone is speaking from a press release. We have a lot of complexity in what we see in the results, and we have the power to react in a fuller and richer way.”

Although demographically specific results can be a source of embarrassment for poorly performing groups, Laitsch said, it can also be a source of power in advocating for greater resources. In his paper Assessment, High Stakes, and Alternative Visions: Appropriate Use of the Right Tools to Leverage Improvement, Laitsch noted that children from high-poverty backgrounds require about 35 percent more funding to reach proficiency, whereas ESL learners may need as much as 100 percent more to reach the same level.

The Fraser Institute’s Peter Cowley told the Straight he’s been filing freedom-of-information requests for years to see the test results from Alberta’s First Nations reserve-based schools. He is denied every year, he said, the reason given being that publication would be “harmful to intergovernmental relations”.

“You get the chief saying, ‘The only result of publicizing the results is to reinforce the stereotype of the dumb Indian,’ ” Cowley said. “There’s a conspiracy of silence. Is there any advantage to openness? With openness comes the responsibility to do something about it.”

To Cowley, that means a school pulling itself up by its own bootstraps and readjusting its teaching tack to suit the students. But to Laitsch and Giesbrecht, the solution has to come from better resources—which have not necessarily been forthcoming, even with the publication of the FSA results.

Laitsch proposed a system of “reciprocal accountability”, which means teachers can hold legislators accountable for adequate funding, just as legislators hold teachers accountable for student results. A coordinated school health model, too, he said, places the emphasis on government programs that support the students outside the school: income assistance, public health, housing, and others.

Neither accountability model, he noted, has been fully tried in any jurisdiction.

He also said that B.C. would be better off if FSA results were not published but simply available on-line for those who choose to seek them out. That way, he said, they would not become overly political, and perhaps get the contemplation they deserve.

Speaking about assessments in Vancouver recently was Eugene Schultz, a Waldorf education consultant from Kimberton, Pennsylvania. Standardized testing, he said in a phone interview, highlights the severed relationship between most parents and teachers. At the nonprofit Waldorf schools, he said, teachers visit families in their homes and stay with the same group of kids for the first nine years of education. That way, student assessment can have depth and meaning.