The next round of Foundation Skills Assessments (FSA) tests are due to start in Mid-January for Grade 4 and 7 students in the district, and the teachers associations are once again voicing their concerns about this testing.
Cariboo-Chilcotin Teachers’ Association (CCTA) president Joan Erb says her organization is encouraging parents to learn more about the FSAs and reconsider if their child should participate in the testing. The CCTA is also requesting the School District 27 (SD27) school board to honour those who opt to bow out.
The CCTA doesn’t trust the validity of the FSA results, as the one-time assessment of the standardized test isn’t averaged over time and doesn’t measure other student achievements, she explains.
“Identifying winners and losers should never be confused with the promotion of excellence.”
The FSAs, which began in 2002, only test three subject areas and reflect the children’s background rather than taking into consideration the geographical location or socioeconomic situations of the students, Erb notes.
“For example, when I was teaching Grade 4, one of the questions on the science part was: ‘when you’re in a planetarium, what do you see?’ and then they had four checks, and one of them was plants.”
While a multitude of children in Vancouver would likely have scored correctly on that test, she says almost all of her students chose plants as their answer because none of those young, rural-based children had ever been to a planetarium.
Erb notes the Provincial Learning Assessment Program (PLAP) that was
discontinued in 1999 was a better assessment tool because
it tested students in six subject areas and was administered through random sampling.
The PLAP results were not “misused to rank schools” because individual students and schools were not identified, she adds, and the random student testing had a lesser financial impact passed on to taxpayers.
There are roughly 90,000 students that write the FSA, at a cost of about $20 per student, Erb says, adding it equals a $1.8 million cost to the province each time they are administered to students.
Some handouts
are being distributed by the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation (BCTF) that have a somewhat stronger emphasis on opting out of the assessments, as they urge all parents to write a letter to their child’s principal, asking they be exempted from writing the exam.
Grade 4 and 7 teachers, in particular, are being asked by the BCTF to send home a pamphlet with information and a sample withdrawal letter before the FSAs are written.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) states on its website that the FSA is an annual province-wide assessment of students’ academic skills that provides a snapshot of how well B.C. children are doing in reading comprehension, writing, and numeracy.
The ministry also states that this skills testing is based on provincial curriculum and performance standards, for the purpose of helping the province, schools, school districts and planning councils evaluate the students’ basic skills and facilitate improving their achievement.
SD27 superintendent Diane Wright uses these FSA results for reading and writing as part of the basis for the Student Achievement Report she submits to the (MOE) each December.
“I recognize the FSA results are controversial, but at the district level in terms of looking at some trends in how our students are doing compared to groups across the province, it does give us some relatively reliable data.”
While he doesn’t think the FSAs are a perfect tool, Trustee Pete Penner says the district definitely needs something to measure how the students are doing.
“If each teacher made the assessment, it would be hard to compare that, even with another part of the district. I know the teachers are doing a good job, but we need some way to demonstrate that.”
Penner notes the B.C. School Trustees Association (BCSTA) asked the MOE last April if it would work on some other assessment tool that both the teachers and the ministry could accept, but he doesn’t know how far the ministry has gotten with that.
“We like to see the improvement from one year to the next, rather than just what the final result is on the FSA. It’s a snapshot of one point in time, and if we do it every year, we can see not only how these students who are taking it this year will do in Grade 7, but we can also compare from year to year in the district.”
If people start pulling their children out of the FSA tests, Penner says it “skews the whole thing” and wouldn’t give a true picture.
