Joel Westheimer, a Full Professor of Education and Democracy at the University of Ottawa thinks the EQAO is too “narrow” and sees a strong correlation between socio-economic factors and test scores.
“Interestingly,” said Westheimer, “if you put a graph up of EQAO scores, and you overlaid it with the graph of family income in the different neighbourhoods of the school, it’s shockingly close together.”
Because of this, Westheimer is skeptical about the necessity of EQAO testing.
“You don’t need to give the test. You already have the data. It’s like, wealthy kids do score higher on it and poorer kids do score lower. So, the problems might be more about economic inequality than anything that’s school-related,” said Westheimer, “it’s weird how much they match.”
“If data from inequality already gives us the same data that EQAO gives us, then … what’s the point of doing the test?”
While Westheimer has his misgivings about a generalized over-reliance on standardized testing in education, he admits there are some things the EQAO does well. However, he believes EQAO testing should be rolled back “significantly” because it is fraught with inaccuracies and misconceptions about learning.
“Standardized testing, in general, can be very useful to take snapshots of education in a particular place and time and see how systems are performing, and how schools are doing, in a very broad sense,” said Westheimer. “The EQAO can be helpful to that.”
“Now, really, to accomplish that, you don’t need to test all students all the time. You can do sample testing to see how a system is working.”
“It’s not as extreme as in the US, which has high-stakes testing with all kinds of impacts from it. But EQAO is more, a kind of, all testing all [the] time,” said Westheimer, “And, the problem with that is … first of all, EQAO is testing math and literacy.”
“Two subject areas get emphasized,” said Westheimer, “Of course, those are important subject areas. But, what happens is that it twists the entire curriculum.”
“The saying is, ‘What gets tested gets taught.’ And, so, for months, often for months before the EQAO exam, there is lots of research that shows that the entire school curriculum across many subject areas gets warped into this preparation for a standardized test, and even within the good subject areas – math and literacy – it’s not like it measures everything that is important within those subject areas.”
“I’ve never heard of an English teacher say, ‘Oh yeah, EQAO measures everything I do in the classroom!'” said Westheimer. “It’s not that it doesn’t tell you anything, it does, but it tells you a small part of what’s going on in schools.”
“[It’s] a snapshot of a narrow band of what schools accomplish more generally.”
“Teachers care about how kids think … whether they’re creative thinkers or critical thinkers, they care about relationships among students. They care about students’ well-being … [and] building community in the classroom. None of these things are things that they measure … even though these are things we care about.”
Westheimer thinks people have a natural disposition toward rankings and ratings.
“As human beings, we love these numbers and rankings,” said Westheimer, “We gravitate to them.”
“If I’m a parent and I see in the newspaper that this school scored a 97 and the other school scored an 83, you know, we say, ‘Okay, I’m going to send my students, to the 97 school.'”
But, that isn’t all Westheimer believes to be related to EQAO.
“Things that we can measure are not all the things that we care about. So, one way to think about it is that we can’t measure many of the things we care about, so, we start to care about the things that we can measure.”
Moreover, Brad Oster, Superintendent of Education for the Rainy River District School Board, echoes there are some things EQAO doesn’t account for.
“Students have many different abilities and learning styles,” said Oster, [By not looking at the creativity, the critical thinking, … their ability as social beings. I think EQAO doesn’t take those things into account.”
This is something Westheimer takes issue with.
“EQAO are the things that we can measure, but, they’re not everything that goes on in schools,” said Westheimer
His biggest concern is how the curriculum alters across learning strands during EQAO years.
“What most concerns me,” said Westheimer, “is the way that the school curriculum and school practices sort of work themselves around EQAO for months before the test each time.”
“The tension of that gets transmitted down to students. And, a lot of students, you know, parents question some of these tests, because a lot of students come home really stressed out, and, you know, crying about the pressure that these tests put on them, even though it’s not direct pressure.”
