The Testing Obsession in Canada

Wednesday October 14, 2009

It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.

Professor Dolores Umbridge
High Inquisitor of Education
Harry Potter V

In his review of Harry Potter V, Eric Margolis (2004) describes the book as a pointed criticism of Britain’s standardized testing. He writes that in Harry’s first four years at Hogwarts School of Magic, classes were student-centred and project-based:

Snape, teaches “Potents” (chemistry) by handing out recipes and supervising lab work; Hagrid teaches “Care of Magical Creatures” (biology) as animal husbandry; and Trelawney, the “Divination” (psychology) teacher encourages crystal gazing and the interpretation of dreams.

This changes, however, when Professor Dolores Umbridge is appointed High Inquisitor of Education by the Ministry. She takes over the Defence Against the Dark Arts class and introduces a “ministry approved curriculum”. She writes the course objectives on the board:

1. Understanding the principles underlying defensive magic.
2. Learning to recognize situations in which defensive magic can legally be used.
3.Placing the use of defensive magic in a context for practical use. (Ibid.)

When Harry Potter’s friend Hermione points out that none of the objectives deal with the actual use of the information they will be studying, Dolores replies that, “it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.”

In Ontario, Michael Fullan is Premier McGuinty’s appointed High Inquisitor of Education. A former advisor to Britain’s Tony Blair government, Fullan oversaw the intensification of the trend started by Margaret Thatcher to replace education with test preparation. When J.K. Rowling parodied Britain’s standardized testing inquisitors, Fullan was the leader of the pack.

A brilliant scholar who writes a book a year, Fullan unfortunately views students as statistics rather than children. He has concocted a grand theoretical model to improve education by improving statistical outcomes on standardized test by “raising the bar” (improving test scores) and “closing the gap” (reducing the gap between high and low test scores). It’s a great theoretical construct with only one flaw. It is based on the premise that education is the same as test preparation.

Just as in Hogwarts, the Ministry has taken control of Ontario’s schools and teachers are now forced to spend hours entering every mark they give their students into a central computer bank where a newly hired army of Ministry bureaucrats analyzes the data and dispatches swat teams to schools that dare to stray from the test preparation mantra. Just as the Hogwarts High Inquisitor wrote her objectives on the board, the walls in Ontario classrooms are decorated with statements of Ministry objectives for centrally planned curriculum assignments, which take up space formerly covered with student art and projects.

Ontario’s EQAO exams have become the focal point of education. Using a funding formula designed by Mike Harris’s government to “create a useful crisis” in our schools, the provincial government forces local trustees to make an annual cycle of cuts that include closing school libraries, cutting music and art teachers and canceling programs for adults who want to return to school to complete their high school diploma. In the meantime, the Ministry spends $250 million annually in school time and EQAO bureaucracy. It offers frequent press releases announcing “new” funding for schools, without mentioning that the much of the money is spent at Queen’s Park on the growing bureaucracy to police the EQAO exams.

For all of this financial investment in testing, what do parents and students get? Very little of any value. On a personal note, my daughter was in grade six two years ago, a year of high pressure exam preparation leading up to the EQAO exam in April. At the end of a year of preparation, for five days, five hours a day, the students sat and wrote their exams. Six months later, when my daughter was in a different school with different teachers, the results of Ontario’s $250 million investment and a year of preparation came back. The answer was “3”: 3 out of 4; 3 in Math; 3 in Reading; 3 in Writing.

When I asked to see her exams, so I could see where she did well and where she didn’t, I was told that the EQAO don’t let the public see the tests. I don’t know what use her new teacher in her new school has made of the “3”, but I doubt very much that she has been able to do much planning around it. So the exams and all of the preparation for them are pretty much useless for the individual students who have to suffer through them. They’re also useless for the teachers and the parents.

One mythical benefit of the EQAO is that the results are supposed to allow us to compare schools and to judge school and provincial improvement in test scores. The Fraser Institute, a right-wing thinktank, publishes annual league tables of test results that are covered in most newspapers. But as John Tory, the Conservative opposition leader, pointed o in the 2007 election campaign, year over year comparison of results is bogus because the tests change every year. Tory pointed out that recent improvements in EQAO test scores were skewed because, for example, students were allowed to use calculators for the math portion of the test for the first time in the year before the election. It is ironic that Tory, whose Conservative party brought in the EQAO regime, would make such a damning criticism of it, but his criticism seems to show that the test scores are manipulated for political purposes and that the best predictor of improved test scores is the proximity of the next election.

As well as not providing any real benefits except for politicians to claim that they are doing something to improve education while distracting attention from the annual cycle of cuts to staff and programs, the over emphasis on standardized testing undermines many of the other goals of education that can’t be measured in a multiple choice exam. Some of the important goals that are being pushed aside because they aren’t measured in multiple choice tests include (Bracey 2003):

Creativity
Critical Thinking
Resilience
Motivation
Ambition
Persistence/Perseverance
Humor
Attitude
Reliability
Politeness
Enthusiasm
Civic-Mindedness
Self-Awareness
Self-Discipline
Empathy
Leadership
Compassion
Courage
Cowardice
Endurance
Confidence
Focus
Teamwork

The obsessive focus is also having an impact on teacher and student morale. Teachers are feeling stretched, and People for Education, an Ontario parents’ organization, reports that the percentage of grade three to six students who enjoy reading has declined steadily since 1998 which may be due to the overemphasis on testing. In other words, our obsessive focus on testing is undermining what should be the primary goal of education, helping students to develop a lifelong love of learning.

Parents do, of course, want to know how their children are doing, and they want to know how their schools are performing. A much simpler and less expensive testing process would give parents and teachers useful information about what kids know and where they are struggling. A test to measure whether students are reading, writing and doing arithmetic at grade level, given at the beginning and end of the school year by teachers in classrooms would provide immediate detailed feedback for both teachers and parents.

Students have to be able to read, write and do arithmetic in order to do well in other subjects. Having a standardized test for just these core skills, rather than everything that is taught in a school year, would mean that students don’t spend five hours a day for an entire week in a high anxiety testing regime to please some distant high inquisitor of education. Instead, teachers would have time to develop activities in which, as Hermione advocated in Hogwarts, students can actually use the information they are studying.

References

Bracey, G. (2003). What You Should Know About the War Against America’s Public Schools. Boston: Pearson Education Inc.

Margolis, E. (2004) Hogwarts Identified As Underperforming School!

Chris Glover is an educator and researcher from Toronto, Canada. He has taught in India, Kenya, and Turkey and currently lectures on Education and Public Policy at York University in Toronto. He is also a parent with two kids in Toronto Public Schools.

Commenting is closed for this article.

Previous Next