Opinion: Standardized tests wrong answer for Sask. schools

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Imagine a provincial government so lost on the K-12 education file that all it’s got left is teacher attack billboards, minister fabrications about complaint letters never actually received, and revisiting failed ideas from its past.

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The latest scheme is reintroducing standardized testing with new lipstick and so of course, like clockwork, the only lobby group defending the move is, you guessed it, the Fraser Institute.

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The Fraser Institute continues to beat the same old drum with its ideologically-driven opinion pieces calling for more standardized testing in Saskatchewan.

This most recent one makes the same erroneous claims which have become the standard boilerplate language in the Fraser Institute’s undying quest to undermine and privatize public education.

Why don’t these opinion pieces ever tell you that Saskatchewan was the only Canadian province whose scores improved on all three measures — reading, math and science — between PISA 2015 and PISA 2018?

Or that in the latest PISA 2022, all Canadian provinces saw a dip in performance, as did almost every country around the world, which is perhaps not surprising given that we were living through a global pandemic.

But what’s really misleading is that, contrary to what is often stated in these opinion columns (and this latest one is no different), Saskatchewan does have provincewide testing; both the Early Years Evaluation – Direct Assessment and Teacher Assessment (EYE-DA, EYE-TA), which together measure: Awareness of self and environment, cognitive skills, language and communication, physical development, and social skills and approach to learning.

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In addition to the EYE provincewide assessments, Saskatchewan students regularly participate in national and international testing programs including: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which assess how well we are doing in reading, mathematics and science.

Moreover, at the division level there are a battery of standardized tests available and used as deemed appropriate.

Together, these tests provide all of the objective and statistically valid data required to undertake macro, or systems level, analyses of Saskatchewan’s educational outcomes, trends and areas of possible concern.

Wasting more money on additional provincewide testing, in an already grossly underfunded system just to tell us what educators already know is simply not the answer as the Fraser Institute itself could tell you, if it had any real interest in a robust public education system.

What do I mean?

The latest PISA results (PISA 2022) reveal that, in math, Saskatchewan (468), Manitoba (470), New Brunswick (468), and Nova Scotia (470) all scored similarly; in reading, Saskatchewan (484), Manitoba (486) and Nova Scotia (489) scored similarly; and in science Saskatchewan (494), Manitoba (492), Nova Scotia (492) and Prince Edward Island (496) had comparable scores.

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Each of these other provinces has the extra and costly additional standardized testing that the Fraser Institute and the Saskatchewan Party aim to implement; however, the numbers don’t lie, they do not outperform Saskatchewan.

That’s the real reason the Fraser Institute so heavily targets Saskatchewan — because we reveal the very inconvenient truth that these standardized tests simply do not improve learning. That said, there’s no denying the importance of math, reading and science.

Educators already know how students are doing and they practise ongoing dynamic assessments on a daily basis. The best public education system is a properly funded one nested in a healthy, equitable society.

In fact, out-of-school factors play a significant role in student learning as well as success on the tests; for example, PISA notes, “Socio-economically disadvantaged students in OECD countries are seven times more likely on average than advantaged students not to achieve basic mathematics proficiency.”

If the Saskatchewan government is serious about not failing our kids, it could start by a) getting serious about addressing class size and complexity concerns with the infrastructure and supports so sorely needed, b) stop siding with lobby groups that curiously attempt to equate educational assessment to an optometrist’s static chart of jumbled nonsensical letters on a distant page, and c) perhaps most importantly, ensure no one in our province lives in poverty.

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Marc Spooner is a professor of education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina.

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