School District No. 46 (SD46) is anticipating a 10 per cent drop in Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) participation rates, following a teachers' union campaign to have parents pull their children from the assessments in order to thwart the Fraser Institute's ability to rank schools.
"Last year we probably had one of the higher participation rates in the province, and [this year] we will probably at least see a decline of around 10 per cent or so," assistant superintendent Tom Hierck said, explaining that final statistics aren't available yet for the assessments, which test literacy and numeracy levels in grades 4 and 7.
Provincially, the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) has encouraged parents to withdraw their children from the assessments, so as to halt the Fraser Institute's annual ranking of schools, which the BCTF considers inaccurate and harmful to schools that rank low despite sound teaching.
The Fraser Institute requires results from 15 students per grade, across each of the three assessments - reading, writing and math - in order to include a school in the rankings, said Peter Cowley, the organization's senior vice president of operations and director of school performance studies.
The teachers' union is advocating that random samplings of students write FSAs, so as to provide data at the provincial level, without the risk of the rankings occurring.
Locally, the Sunshine Coast Teachers' Association (SCTA) provided concerned grades 4 and 7 teachers with pamphlets detailing the BCTF's position on FSAs to send home with students.
Hierck said the school district expected students to comply with Ministry guidelines, which stipulated that all students must write FSAs except in the event of a family emergency, a lengthy illness or "other extenuating circumstances."
Hierck said the BCTF's campaign - which argued that FSAs are expensive, don't help teaching and learning, and are misused to rank schools and promote privatization - created "a bit of friction" in the school district by suggesting that students without Ministry-approved reasons could be excused from the assessment.
In some "extreme" situations, he said, parents told students to go ahead and write, but "not to put much effort into the test."
SCTA president Jenny Garrels said that it's "hard to say" if that strategy accomplished anything regarding the union's concern with school rankings. "It was really the non-participation we were after to invalidate the results," she said.
And Hierck added that while the FSA provides useful data for the school district, nobody's disputing the union's negative view of the school rankings.
"There isn't a group out there - whether it's superintendents, principals, parents, teachers - that endorses the work of the Fraser Institute," he said.
Hierck said the debate around FSAs should focus, not on the value of the assessments, but on how the data is collected and used.
