More students wrote the Foundation Skills Ass-essment (FSA) this year, despite questions regarding its relevance from local teachers and school board trustees.
"About 84 per cent of the approximately 89,000 students in grades 4 and 7 wrote the FSA in 2011, an increase of one per cent from 2010," a press release from the Ministry of Education stated.
The FSA is administered each year to students in grades 4 and 7 to test reading, writing and math skills.
While the Ministry praises the testing, saying it gives parents important information about their child's learning, the opinion of local educators is much different.
"This test does not help students learn or teachers teach. It takes valuable time and much needed resources away from the classroom learning and undermines the ability to provide meaningful learning experiences for all students," said Louise Herle, president of the Sunshine Coast Teachers' Association (SCTA).
She thinks that perhaps more students took the test this year because the Ministry made it more difficult to opt out.
An open letter to parents from former Minister of Education Margaret MacDiarmid at the beginning of this year stated that "contrary to misinformation, the FSA is not optional - if you have any questions, please contact your child's principal."
In previous years, teachers told parents that writing the FSA was optional, resulting in more parents pulling their kids from the testing.
This year, teachers handed out a pamphlet outlining the ways teachers test and assess children in the classroom, implying the FSAs were unwarranted, but not outright telling parents to have their children abstain from the testing.
While the testing itself concerns the SCTA, the school board is concerned about the use of FSA statistics by the Fraser Institute that ranks schools.
"We vehemently disagree with the rankings of schools using FSAs and we've made this clear to multiple ministers over the years," said School District No. 46 board chair Silas White. "We've suggested that the identities of schools could be masked publicly. They don't need to be released publicly and that way there would be no means for the Fraser Institute to create its problematic ranking of schools that everyone refutes, including the Ministry.
"The rankings are really the number one problem when it comes to the FSAs."
White admitted the information obtained through the FSAs can be useful, but said local testing is more accurate, administered more often and geared toward individual students.
"We do have some other forms of assessment in the District that we find more useful that track students on more of a yearly basis," White said.
This year's FSA scores show 79 per cent of students in Grade 4 meeting or exceeding reading targets, 78 per cent meeting or exceeding writing targets and 79 per cent meeting or exceeding numeracy targets. In the Grade 7 FSAs 70 per cent are meeting or exceeding reading targets, 76 per cent are meeting or exceeding writing targets and 63 per cent are meeting or exceeding numeracy targets.
