Making the Grade
The Politics of the Grade Three Test

HighGrader Magazine Jan/Feb 1998
by Brit Griffin
This article may be downloaded but any reprints require prior permission from HighGrader Magazine.

When I was little, it was a yearly ritual to go down to the gymnasium and sit in  solemn rows of desks and write a long test. We answered multiplication and division questions, counted how many gallons it took Mr. Jones to drive to town if he used 2 gallons an hour and the trip was 6.5 hours, etc. We used pencils to fill in the circles next to the multiple choice answers. We called this ritual the dot test and once the test was written, we never heard hide nor hair of the marks. The results were not posted in the papers, debated on television or used to prove our school was better or worse than the school down the road.
Not so with little Johnny in today's Ontario. Last spring's province-wide assessment of Grade 3, as well as some testing of Grade 6, was the first of its kind in many years. After undergoing a gruelling ten-day test put together by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), Grade 3 students across the province have found themselves at the centre of a very intense controversy. But the question about how well the children did on the province-wide test is deflecting attention away from a much more fundamental question: was little Johnny set up? Were the province's 8-year-olds used as fall guys to justify a massive shake up in how education services are delivered across Ontario?  

In the run-up to the crisis over the controversial new education act, Bill 160 (and the resulting 10 day provincial wide teacher's strike), Ontario's Education Minister Dave Johnson pointed to the results of the Grade 3 tests as a justification for the government's decision to assume almost all levers of control over education. Johnson said he was concerned that "not enough students were meeting the standards in Ontario."
The press dutifully repeated the Minister's claim that students had done poorly on the tests. What was not so dutifully reported by the government is that 80% of Ontario students met or exceeded the provincial standard in reading, 82%  in writing and 75% in mathematics. Neither did the Minister of Education make any effort to congratulate Ontario students for doing well  in international science testing (SAIP).

The Grade 3 test was marked on a four level marking system with Level One as below average and Level Four as beyond the expectation of the grade. Into Level One were lumped not only kids who performed below average but also children for whom there was no data or were exempted. About one half of the Level One scores were a result of these additions, children who often hadn't even written the test. This skewed the overall percentages downward, creating a misleading picture of the assessment results.
Bud Wildman, Education Critic for the NDP, sees the Minister's negative spin of the assessment as a clear case of manipulation. "We have a government that has been attempting to persuade the public that the education system is broken. A government that has said repeatedly that students in Ontario are in the caboose of the education train in North America."
Dr. David Ireland was hired by the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association (OECTA) to perform an independent assessment of the test. "If you look at it provincially," says Dr. Ireland, "in language arts, the percentage of students at Level One, the unacceptable level, was below 10% and in math it was 17%. What do people expect? That means the rest of them are reaching the standard or exceeding it. The government really has no grounds for saying this is unacceptable. The kids in the system did extraordinarily well."
Dave Johnson's office maintains that having the majority of Ontario's 8-year-olds performing at acceptable levels is simply not good enough.
Rita Smith, the Minister's secretary explains: "The EQAO was on record saying that a Level 2 was acceptable and they would like to work towards Level 3. Our Minister said he would like to see our students working at Level 3 now. EQAO was willing to grant a grace period while students got used to the testing but the Minister stated that he considered a Level 3 to be the goal and he didn't see any reason why there should be a time-lag in making that goal, he thought that goal should be now."
The Minister's call for an immediate improvement in results has been made more difficult by the fact that in terms of marking requirements, the Ministry of Education has narrowed the goal posts. The four level approach in the EQAO test mirrors the grading system in the new standardized report card. Under the new system, Level 4, or the A grade, is reserved for students performing at a skill level higher than their grade.
A child accustomed to an A average (performing well at their grade level) has been re classified as a Level 3 on the test and a B average on their report card. Good students with a B average have now been lowered to a C (or Level 2). Thus when a parent hears that their child is now scoring at Level 2 or the equivalency of a C grade, no wonder there is cause for concern.
It becomes even more confusing when one considers that a Level One on the new report card is a D - but a D is now 50 - 59%. Grades below 50% are ranked as R. But on the province-wide assessment, Level One is the lowest possible ranking. Reconciling the new grades and the new levels with the expectations of  traditional marking patterns is somewhat like trying to get one's bearings in a funhouse mirror.

Scoring the Test
When the EQAO test was conducted in April 1996, it was dogged by criticism from teachers and parents. Objections were raised about the length (10 full days), the rigidity (students were not allowed to ask clarifying questions) and the content (based on curriculum some students didn't have). Adding to the air of rigidity was the fact that parents have not been allowed to take their children's marked tests off school property.
Now the EQAO test is coming under fire for the appropriateness of the assessment itself. Dr. Ireland says that many of the math questions on the EQAO test were geared to students at higher grade levels. According to Ireland, of the 62 math questions presented, 20% were aimed at levels beyond Grade three and some were more appropriate for a Grade 6 or 9 level. The EQAO field tested the questions on Grade 4 students, who, presumably had already successfully completed all the material. The Grade 3 subjects, on the other hand, faced the test in early spring when some curriculum objectives still remained untaught.
Judy Wiener, a Professor of Development and Applied Psychology at OISE (Ontario  Institute of Studies in Education), has been critical of the test. "One of the things you would hope that students would know by the end of Grade 3 is how to subtract multiple digit numbers with borrowing and carrying over." She says it would have been reasonable to expect at least 10 or 12 items on the test to cover the concept. Instead, however, there was only one question and it was geared to high end skills of subtraction and borrowing. "The question involved taking away 526 from 2000. It is a complex question because you have zeros you have to convert to nines. I'm not saying the question shouldn't have been on the test but from this one question you have no way to judge if a child knows anything at all  about re-grouping."
Wiener says that by always setting the hardest example, children were not able to show what they knew, they only could be exposed for what they didn't know.
Ireland feels the test undermined the children's confidence. "I've been constructing tests for 15 years and there is a golden rule you follow is that you always have a Ôgimmee' or two at the beginning of the section just so the kids feel good about themselves and then you go on to the more difficult questions."
Ireland points out that the reading section, rather than building towards the most difficult question, begins with the most difficult. He says that many of the 7 and 8-year-olds were simply demoralized and stopped trying.
Wiener agrees. "From what I understand from teachers, children were in states of very high anxiety. Many of them, those who would be in the bottom half of the class, were unable to do almost anything on the test, yet had to sit through and face it day after day for ten days."
Micki Clemens, from EQAO, says that student anxiety was not caused by the test but by teacher apprehension. "I think because it was the first time for this scale of assessment, teachers were naturally apprehensive about it and communicated this to the students and that then sort of snowballed." She maintains that the test allowed for a range of performance.
Prof. Wiener says she is not opposed to standardized testing but says the $7 million dollar assessment wasn't very helpful in showing how Ontario students are performing. She says it did not test for skills which most parents would like their children to know by the end of Grade 3.

"I'm not saying you shouldn't find some very challenging items on a test because you do want to find out how far some children can go," says Wiener, " but you also want to know what the children who can't do the more difficult items are able to do. The very information that is being used to say our children are deficient in their skills is really the information that says they haven't developed a valid test."

Counting the Costs
The results of the EQAO test has pitted board against board and school against school as educators, parents and media add up the supposed winners and losers. Micki Clemens says the test results should be used to improve the education of Ontario's students. She says the tests provided the "...fuel to go back to the trustees and Boards and say, Ôwe now need to focus our resources on mathematics.' There has to be a long-term plan, and this is where wise and prudent decision-making comes into play."
Rita Smith of the Minister's office says that improving the scores will not come from injecting more money into the system, it will come from the government taking financial control from the local boards. "Let's say  in the past we decided to spend an extra half a billion on textbooks and teacher training. We don't have any guarantee that the money will go to textbooks and training. As someone flippantly put it, Ôwe don't know that the principal won't decide that he needs another secretary.'" 
Critics, however, point out that while the test results may or may not show a deficiency in mathematics they clearly show a deficiency in funding: schools with higher per pupil funding generally did better than schools with lower per pupil funding.
"The unfortunate thing about all of this," says Marshall Jarvis of OECTA, "is that in many classrooms the per pupil expenditure for the assessment far exceeded the per pupil expenditure for classroom resources for an entire year. The cost per pupil of performing the EQAO assessment was about $50, while many classroom have an annual expenditure per pupil of $40 - 60 for all resources."
Lyn McLeod, education critic for the Liberal party, says that the EQAO wanted to use the test results to respond to student needs but "...the only thing the government did with this (information) is say our students didn't do very well therefore the system is being badly managed and so we should take some money out of it. This isn't good reasoning and it certainly doesn't deal with the concerns the testing office wanted addressed."
Dr. Ireland also finds the government's negative spin on the test results baffling, especially in light of the difficult nature of the EQAO test. "You have to go back to John Snobelen's (former Minister of Education) comment about the need to create a crisis in the education system and you have ask what he meant by that....does the government really know the implications of its actions? Has it thought it through beyond simply saying if we bash the schools, then we can bash the teachers, then we can take away their bargaining rights and hire non-teachers and have a cheaper education system. But you really have to ask why do they want to tell our kids that they are having a lousy education?"

The controversy surrounding the Grade 3 testing raises the issue of how much say the government of the day should have over curriculum. During their term in office, the New Democrats brought in a province-wide "Common Curriculum" and it fell to the boards to purchase the new materials and textbooks needed to teach this curriculum. Barely had the curriculum been implemented when the Conservatives came to power and announced that another new curriculum was being introduced. Will the next government in power prove they are "doing something about education" by trashing the new curriculum and expecting students to start learning to an even newer standard?
The EQAO testing highlights the issue because the government used the implementation and results of the Grade 3 test in a very public battle with the province's teacher's unions. As Bud Wildman points out, "I don't think it was any coincidence that this (the assessment results) were released in the middle of the teacher's protest."
As Bill 160 is implemented and the new funding formula for education released, little Johnny will likely remain a political football in the arena of Ontario politics. Since Education Minister Dave Johnson has said that the teachers have no business bringing politics into the classroom, the question might well be asked, should government be dragging the classroom into politics?    

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