Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
The recent patronage appointment of a failed PC candidate Cameron Montgomery as CEO of the EQAO testing agency with a fat salary is another insult to educators in Ontario. It follows upon the establishment of a ‘snitch’ line for parents to report teacher misconduct. Now we have a CEO elect with a political ax to grind. Both of these moves show a tremendous disregard and disrespect for the high level of training, knowledge, expertise and commitment demonstrated by Ontario teachers particularly in elementary who make up the majority of teachers in Ontario. Appinting a male to govern women teachers has a long history.
Education is an extremely complex undertaking that requires a litany of social-emotional skills that are not developed overnight or by reading about them. Elementary schools are paradoxically the most complex of all. Teachers deal with students, parents and the local community, trustees and board administrators that are all making demands of them. The politics in elementary schools is vicious with female parents making unreasonable demands of the schools all the time. Teachers rarely complain.
This is Back-to-the-Future politics. Mike Harris introduced “accountability” in the 1990s when standardized testing was touted as the panacea for improving educational outcomes. Twenty years later we’re still waiting. Forty years of testing in the U.S. proved exactly nothing as results simply flatlined giving less and less information to educators.
Political and social havoc was created in schools and communities due to lower quartile results. Standardized testing was eagerly rammed down the throats of educators in Ontario as a political tool to drive votes by attacking teachers. Information that had no proven direct research link to student performance or teacher quality inflicted enormous negative collateral social damage in achieving its noble aims. Previous CEOs of EQAO cautioned that results should not be aggregated or used to compare schools but that is exactly what happened. The socio-cultural damage to local community relationships and humiliation at the school level if you were in the bottom quartile was palpable and visceral. Parents took their frustrations out on staff and principals while Superintendents and Directors stood by and watched or even cheered them on. Professional reputations were dragged through the mud while principals scrambled to put in place new textbooks and ways of teaching in the hopes of turning the tide. Irreparable harm was done.
Essentially teachers and principals were being held accountable over political issues which they often had very little control. With a highly mobile student population it was anyone’s guess what the results would be each year. Schools that were darlings one year inexplicably plummeted the next. Schools with P.A.C.E.(Gifted) programs always did well. Testing did not link results with the source of the results. Ignored were cultural and socio-economic factors, social mobility, ESL issues and parenting factors in the obsession with ‘results.’ Also ignored were educational issues such as staffing, the lack of tracking from one year to the next, the textbooks used and student time spent studying to name only a few. Standardized testing was a single, thin slice of life in a student’s history and nothing more but it was used to vilify schools and educators. There was also a huge gender-bias working here as elementary schools were heavily tested and held accountable while token testing was done in secondary. No testing was done in post-secondary, an area that has not changed in a hundred years.
Student performance was initially low on these tests and so rather than add funding to education to improve outcomes the province decided to manipulate the testing by making it shorter and less rigorous until results began to climb to meet political targets. The entire exercise was a shell game intended to create the illusion of public accountability when the reality was that finding the cure for ignorance was as difficult as finding a cure for cancer.
Standardized testing only tests a certain kind of machine knowledge, math skills and language proficiency. Other kinds of knowledge and skills gained in studying history, geography, art and music were never tested. Standardized testing is a very small subset of what makes schools great. Unlike other professions like law and medicine who are respected and allowed to independently determine what will be done in particular cases education has always been controlled by patriarchal political forces and that is its Achilles heel. This has led to an endless revolving door of failed reforms and ongoing hostility between the public and educators. The economy always gets blamed on educators, but they rarely receive credit when it is booming. The province is once again ready to revamp standardized testing and revive a simplistic tool for bashing teachers.
Until we start putting educators first and not politicians, parents or ivory tower male professors to independently and professionally make educational decisions we will never have an effective education system. There is a difference between consultation and control.