"Teachers are concerned that your government is relying more and more on a discredited American-style testing agenda instead of putting resources into the classroom to help individual students."Since I have a child in grade 4 who will be taking these exams, I thought I would look more closely into this. In my mind, there are two main issues:
1) Whether the FSAs are a good idea or not.
2) Whether teachers have the right to refuse to administer them.
Let's talk about both of them in turn. From reviewing the literature from both sides (I discounted that from the government and that from the BCTF, since both clearly have axes to grind), it's clear that the issue is not so much whether the tests have any value, it's how much value they have and thus how much weight should be placed on their results. The BCTF and other critics are perfectly right to say that it is impossible to claim that School A is wholly better than School B simply on the basis of the responses to two written tests, written in one afternoon, from a small portion of the schools' populations. However, only a fool would try to make such a claim. Of course there is much more to school and student achievement than just the scores on these tests. When it comes time for report cards, I am sure no teacher in the province gives the slightest thought as to how a student did on the FSA. However, I do expect that School Boards will look at the results and ask questions like "Hmm. It looks like grade 4 aboriginal girls in our schools did significantly worse in writing than those in School District X, even though that district is quite similar to ours in terms of demographics. Maybe there is something to learn over there, let's find out." In short, results like these should serve largely as a source of new questions as everyone involved -- students, teachers, administrators, and politicians -- all try to give our children the best education possible. They should not serve as anything approaching a be-all and end-all measure of a school's success, and judging from the anecdotal history I mentioned earlier, it never has been within the school administration establishment. FSAs are and should be one tool in a drawer, that's all. The BCTF, it seems to me, are secretly really angry at a third party, the Fraser Institute, who chooses to take the data, mix and match it one way, and then produce results it claims are holistic and valid. I understand that. But it's a separate issue. It can't be helped if some organization misuses government data, or if individuals naively accept it. Heck, maybe I or the BCTF should process the numbers a different way to demonstrate, for example, that the altitude of a school above sea level, or the number of sunny days it usually enjoys in February, is correlated with FSA success. As for whether or not the teachers have the right to refuse to administer the exam, I cannot see how it is possible to claim that they do. Provincial exams of various kinds have been administered in British Columbia for over a hundred years. The FSAs and its predecessors have been around for thirty years or so. Teachers in hundreds of jurisdictions across the world administer similar tests. If the government was mandating, say, a return to corporal punishment, or requiring that students be classroom-bound for 12 hours per day, I think the teachers would have a professional leg to stand on. But not in this instance. Some are claiming that the BCTF executive is just looking for a hot-button issue they can use to spend advertising money on in the lead-up to our scheduled provincial election in May. That would allow them in effect to skirt the third-party election advertising gag rule, which prevents them from explictly spending a lot of money on "Don't Vote Liberal" advertising. While I am sure that this is by no means the main reason the BCTF is pursuing this issue now, I can't imagine that it did not play in some way in the decision. We'll see in the next few months.