The Ministry of Education created and financed the EQAO and we seem to be stuck with it. Check out their well appointed web site at www.eqao.com. It talks about accountability and quality and improving learning and teaching. But that is not what the EQAO is really about.
Based on a pilot testing program run by the North York Board of Education, it was supposed to objectively monitor the qualify of public education in the province through standardized education.
In fact, it is an expensive public relation tool that documents the ability of schools and a student to write it’s standardize tests. It does not show how well any school is actually educating its students.
So, how expensive is the EQAO? take a look at its AGM report page 22. $56,000,000 is siphoned from the Ministry of Education to support the standardized testing program.
That is not all that is wasted by this farce. Schools spend many hours a year teaching to the test – showing students how to beat the test format, concentrating curriculum on things that are usually tested and ignoring other area those students may need. All of this drains students too much of the support that actually need to succeed.
All this is done to support a scientifically false process.
The EQAO tests are not an objective tools. They change year by year. If scores seem too high or low, the test is changed.
And results are inherently deceiving. Some schools do very well on the tests because they have students from well-settled middle class homes. Those children that have socially enriched homes usually do well no matter how badly the school is doing.
Just think how teachers could be bought for $56,000,000. Think about how many repairs could be done to our aging schools with $56,000,000. $56,000,000 could support outdoor education for a lot of inner-city students.
No. The province would rather spend money on a bloated bureaucracy and all the wasted garbage around the testing.
And the right wing Fraser Institute issues a report based on these crude findings. According to them you might wonder why would we even consider keeping school in poorer communities open? After all they usually don’t do all that well on the sacred tests.
Actually sometimes schools in poorer communities improve on their test scores. But this is usually done at great expense to real education. Teachers and consultants spend valuable school time drilling students on how to write the test. They can usually only keep this up for a few years and then the scores drop. Hey, if you want to know how rich a community is you can use the EQAO scores and a good measure. But that is not what it was supposed to do. It was supoosed to be about educational quality. Don’t tell the Fraser Institute.
