The Sunshine Coast Teacher's Association (SCTA) is encouraging Coast parents of Grade 4 and 7 students to withdraw their children from writing a province-wide assessment this month, which the Fraser Institute uses to rank schools.
"The way the data is used is really damaging," said Jenny Garrels, president of the SCTA," explaining that if enough students don't write, the data won't be statistically significant and will stop the organization from carrying out the rankings.
The Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) assesses student literacy and numeracy at the Grade 4 and Grade 7 levels. The assessments, Garrels said, start Jan. 18 and occur during a two- or three-week window.
The union is asking for a moratorium on FSAs, and a move towards assessing a "random sampling" of students from each school, which would still deliver results at a provincial level, but put a halt to the school rankings.
The Fraser Institute's 2009 ranking of provincial elementary schools, based on the 2007/2008 school year, gave local schools a rank out of 952 schools. The rankings were: Halfmoon Bay, 61; West Sechelt, 131; Cedar Grove, 131; Langdale, 474; Gibsons, 600; and Roberts Creek, 644.
Garrels said rankings are both misleading and dangerous, and push towards school privatization.
"It's what you can do with numbers, I guess," she said. "It can portray one view of something, which is not a true view of what's going on."
Garrels cited a CBC documentary called Teacher's Challenge: Seven Days in a Struggling School, in which reporter Mark Kelley spent a week at Prince Rupert's Roosevelt Park Elementary School, B.C.'s worst-ranked school, only to discover that "it was a fabulous school." The school, in a primarily First Nations area with high unemployment, had 60 of its 210 students coping with severe learning disabilities and behaviour issues.
Garrels said the union will provide local teachers with letters and brochures, which if they feel strongly against FSAs they can send home with kids, to alert parents to the option of protesting the test.
But School District No. 46 superintendent Deborah Palmer said schools aren't equipped to provide alternate programming for students who have been withdrawn from the tests.
Also, she said, given that the assessments are administered over a window of time and may be rescheduled if too many students are away sick, objecting parents would have to keep children home "for quite awhile" to ensure they didn't write the test.
Palmer said the assessments do have value, in that they make teachers and administrators take a second look at how students are performing.
"It kind of confirms what you already know, or it asks you to question what you already know," she said.
But Palmer adds the ranking issue is a problem and can push schools to make educationally-damaging decisions, such as accepting only high-performing students into certain classes to guarantee good results.
"Our board has asked many times that the Ministry not reveal the names of the schools, that they just give [the schools] the results, but they don't seem to be responding to that," she said.
Palmer recommended that, instead of pulling kids out of the assessments, objecting parents write letters to the school board or to Powell River-Sunshine Coast MLA Nicholas Simons.
