THE FREE PRESS NEWS NOVEMBER 12, 2000 A5 School board defends tests But head of teachers’ union calls the assessment ineffective Thousands of dollars spent testing the reading, writing and mathematical skills of every Grade 4, 7 and 10 student in B.C. may have been wasted, says the president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation. David Chudnovsky says B.C. Foundation Skills Assessment 2000 tests are inappropriate and ineffective. The local school district plans to use the results to examine its programming and curriculum. “There’s not very much we know now that we didn’t know before,” says Mr. Chudnovsky. The tests coincide with data showing students with greater economic positions often do better and schools need to perform better with aboriginal students. Those points, he says, didn’t need to be confirmed with a province-wide study “We knew that already,” he adds. What’s worse is the danger that school districts will take the results too seriously, forgetting to blend them with other forms of testing to get an accurate read on student performance, he says. “It’s merely a measure of how those students did on a particular day,” he says. It doesn’t mean the Prince George district is a better school district than the one in Quesnel because more Grade 4 students exceeded the provincial average. He says the problems will get worse when individual school results are made public next week. He fears it will send parents on a hunt for the school with the best grades come enrolment time. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that sending individual students to a school with higher results How our kids did Grade 4 Not Within Meets Exceeds Reading 24 % 71% 5 % Writing 11 % 87% 1 % Numeracy 28 % 66% 6% Grade 7 Not Within Meets Exceeds Reading 21 % 73% 6% Writing 22 % 73% 5% Numeracy 24 % 69% 7% Grade 10 Not Within Meets Exceeds Reading 22 % 70% 8% Writing 44 % 54% 1 % Numeracy 32 % 63 % 6 % would affect their grades,” says Mr. Chudnovsky. “Some parents may send their children to a school with low results because their children will do well in comparison. There’s a fundamental lack of logic here.” He believes the test should have been used as it was originally intended - to test the effectiveness of education ministry programs in a small random sample of schools. Norm Munroe, director of school services for the Prince George District, says the school board fought hard for the testing. Even if the data isn’t trusted in its first year, over time he believes the skills testing will allow district employees to evaluate what the school is doing right and wrong. He’s called a meeting with different schools next week after each school gets its individual results. “If four or five schools are doing really well we can reflect on what they are doing differently and see what math book or resource text they are using.” The same, he says, will be done on a lesser scale B.C. wide, where some districts who have done better may be getting phone calls. One area the district knows it has a problem is with bringing the district’s 13 per cent of aboriginal students up to the district standard. “It’s no secret that our public education system has not done well with our aboriginal population,” says Mr. Munroe. “Their performance is not at par with other students.” The board is trying several different tactics including improving the image of public schools to the parents of aboriginal students, and including native culture into school programs. The problem here can be more challenging than northern, remote schools because local native populations here are more urban based and can come from many different bands, he says. PRINCE GEORGE SAVINGS CREDIT UNIOV "EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE" Phone Link 612-3456 to all branches Town Centre 1532-Sixth Ave. Fax: 612-3451 5th & Abhau 513 Abhau St. Fax: 612-3555 Parkwood Place *103, 1600-1 Sth Ave. Fax: 612-3505 Christmas Gift Packs are in! Party Promotions & TV T.L.C. Catering Proudly Present... 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