Why we should end EQAO testing

With the Peel District School Board’s recent motion to suspend EQAO testing, cracks are beginning to form in Ontario’s standardized testing regime. This comes as the province has announced a review of the tests, along with the provincial curriculum and report cards.

This cannot come soon enough for many Ontario teachers who question the value of having every single Grade 3,6, 9, and 10 student in the province write these tests year after year.

The catalyst behind the introduction of large-scale standardized testing to Ontario was the 1995 Royal Commission on Learning, which recommended the introduction of standardized tests in Grades 3 and 11. The provincial NDP government at the time, looking to show they were serious about school accountability in an attempt to stave off looming electoral defeat, took it a step further and created the Education Quality and Accountability Office, which it directed to conduct standardized testing in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 11.

When the Ontario Liberals came to power in 2003, in the face of opposition to the tests from teachers and parents, they stated that the tests would only be used to assess the performance of the system as a whole. While this sounded great in theory, in practice each year EQAO test results have since been treated as a direct account of the performance of every single school board, school, teacher and student in the province. As a result, the province, school boards, and individual schools have continually rolled out initiative after initiative (e.g. new curriculums, more teacher training, more time devoted to core subjects, etc.) to improve scores.

Immense pressure is often placed on teachers, especially those in the tested grades, to boost scores as well. This results in them spending a significant amount of time each year doing nothing but test prep. And these effects filter down to other grades.

In a recent study, a GTA principal admitted that the kindergarten teachers at his school were receiving pressure from teachers in the primary grades to move away from play-based learning toward more formal instruction in order to better prepare the kindergarten students to eventually write the Grade 3 EQAO tests.

Parents and other members of the public often view EQAO as an infallible measure of learning, but if you look closely at the test results themselves, there is reason to question this assumption.

For many years now, the trend in the Grades 3, 6, and 9 math scores have looked like a “V” shape. Scores in Grade 3 start relatively high, dip precipitously in Grade 6, and then shoot up again in Grade 9.

There are two possible explanations for this. Either teachers until Grade 3 are good at teaching math, and then become terrible between Grades 4 to 6, and then become good again between Grades 7 to 9. Or there is a problem with the tests themselves. In fact, there are experts working at the Ministry of Education who in private admit that the tests, particularly the Grade 6 test, are likely the problem.

This calls into question the rationale for having such large-scale testing in the first place. If the purpose is to assess the performance of the system as a whole, as the Liberals originally stated, there is no need to test every single student in the province every single year.

A better alternative would be to randomly sample a subset of students once every three years. This is what Ontario currently does with the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures Ontario’s performance against other jurisdictions around the world, and is widely considered the gold-standard of tests.

It is also what the province does with the PanCanadian Assessment Program (PCAP), which measures Ontario against the other Canadian provinces. Moving to a cyclical scheme that only tests a subset of students would drastically reduce the amount of time Ontario teachers spent on test prep and would provide students with more opportunity for authentic learning experiences instead.

When large-scale testing was introduced in Canada and other parts of the world, advocates promised it would significantly improve school quality. Decades later, almost no one makes that claim anymore. Given the little evidence of benefits, and all the costs, the province should just end EQAO testing as it currently exists.