Did literacy test fraud last five years?
Records show elevated exemptions of students at French school started in 2007
WATERLOO REGION — A testing fraud at a Cambridge high school may have lasted five years and not just two years as reported by the Ontario College of Teachers.
An analysis of test results suggests that the scheme to improve the school’s test results may have seen educators improperly delay or exempt about 84 students from writing a French literacy test between 2006-07 and 2010-11.
Only 13 students were cited in disciplinary proceedings.
“It doesn’t surprise me because it happened to me,” said Michelle Ménard, 27, a former student at École secondaire catholique Père-René-de-Galinée.
“I remember feeling very embarrassed. I just didn’t feel smart. I just felt behind everybody.”
Ménard recalls being told that her French was too weak to write the literacy test that her Grade 10 classmates were writing.
French is her second language. She sat in the cafeteria, demoralized.
This happened two years before her school began deferring unusually high numbers of students in 2007. It happened while the school was led by two educators who later admitted their roles in the practice.
When students finally wrote the literacy test, which they had to pass to graduate, some were improperly allowed extra time to complete it, or they were improperly given English translations to help them understand it.
It bothers Ménard that her school improperly delayed student tests. Sitting out made her feel like she was not smart enough. She carried that feeling with her even as she passed the literacy test a year later and went on to graduate from the University of Guelph.
When she passed the literacy test in Grade 11, “I recall the teachers helping us with the questions, even translating them for us.”
The school’s former principal, Carole Wilson, and its former vice-principal, Marc Lamoureux, have had their teaching licences suspended for up to nine months after admitting misconduct before the teachers’ college which governs their profession.
They still work for the school board but not at the high school.
Their admission before the teachers’ college relates only to 2009-10 and 2010-11.
But an analysis of test results by The Record reveals that while the school deferred six per cent of students from writing the test between 2002 and 2006, test deferrals soared to 25 per cent between 2007 and 2011, four times higher than the Ontario deferral rate of six per cent for French literacy over the same period.
Ontario’s public testing agency didn’t investigate the school until parents complained after the 2011 test.
“We don’t analyze deferral rates,” said Mark Ruban, spokesperson for the Education Quality and Accountability Office.
“We trust educators and teachers to do what they have to do to get these tests done.”
Probing complaints, the agency accepted the school’s explanation that it was simply giving Grade 10 students one more year to gain French skills before taking the test in Grade 11.
“There was insufficient evidence to confirm an instance of impropriety at the time,” Ruban said.
The school’s explanation was later dismissed by the teachers’ college.
The school board, the Conseil scolaire de district catholique Centre-Sud, also investigated testing in 2011 after parents complained. It ended the practice, demoting the educators for one year in 2012 as punishment.
The board refused to answer questions about the length of the testing fraud and why the board failed to detect it for so long.
The Record found that over five years the school deferred or exempted 91 students from the literacy test.
This compares to just nine students deferred or exempted in five years since the board ended the scheme.
That’s a decline of 90 per cent in deferrals and exemptions.
Comparing these five-year periods suggests that up to 84 students might have been improperly deferred or excused.