Standardized tests are not useful at all

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: Standardized testing provides useful information, Jan. 14

Richard Knight concludes his Jan. 14 letter: “I believe that we should continue to give the (FSA) tests and receive the useful information they provide, and simply ignore the Fraser Institute.”

What useful information?

The B.C. government has mandated the Foundation Skills Assessment tests to students in Grades 4 and 7 since 2000, which supposedly assess reading comprehension, writing, and numeracy.

In reality, these tests have flawed methodology. FSAs are not accurate indicators of individual progress, since no single measure of assessment provides reliable data by itself. FSAs do not take in account a student’s learning style, nor do they help students learn or teachers teach.

A question for the Minister of Education, school board members and school principals: “If these tests are so important and contain useful information, have the test results ever resulted in additional funding or support for certain schools and students?”

Then you have the Fraser Institute misusing the FSA data to create unscientific school rankings. For those unaware, this is the same right-wing think tank that in 1999, wrote letters to British American Tobacco begging for more funding, highlighting reports they had done to discredit science around the harms of second-hand smoke. This is the same right-wing think tank that supports huge tax cuts for the 1% and corporations, but opposes a higher minimum wage for workers.

Patti Bacchus was chair of the Vancouver School Board from 2008 to 2014. Google her Jan. 2 article, “FSA tests misused, should be scrapped”.

Bacchus concludes: “FSAs may have been well intended when they were brought in, but when the professionals we trust to teach our kids are telling us they’re a harmful waste of time, we should listen. I support B.C.’s teachers in calling on government to scrap the discredited and misused tests.”

I recall American author and lecturer Alfie Kohn was the keynote speaker at our teachers convention several years ago. Kohn’s talk is still very fresh in my mind. He works in the areas of education, parenting and human behaviour, and was described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades (and) test scores.”

In 2004, Kohn was interviewed for an article in Hope Magazine (Test Ban Entreaty, Jan-Feb. 2004). He remarked: “The farther you get from real kids, the more likely you are to think that standardized testing is a fine idea.”

A PDF of the article is available on Kohn’s website.

David Buckna, Kelowna