The minister’s position is shared by many of the people who are unhappy with Canadian schools. In their view, tests provide useful information for assessing the quality of schooling. Experts can specify what students ought to know or do, and test results will show whether or not they can do it, thus providing a measure of the effectiveness of schools. A school where most or all students pass the tests will, by definition, be effective. Better yet, if the test results can be published, as they now are in various parts of Canada, and if parents can be allowed to choose their children’s schools, there will be a rush to get into the good schools and a rush away from the bad ones. Thus, competition will help improve the quality of schooling.Even if this public competition is not allowed to take place, administrators will still know which schools are good and which are bad and act accordingly. As test scores are collected over the years, they will show whether the quality of flat roof repair schooling is improving or declining over time. Just as business cannot operate without sales figures, profit-and-loss statements and productivity indicators, so education needs its test scores. They alone can provide the information that policy-makers need. How well do Canadian students do in mathematics or any other subject? Should they do better? Where do they need to improve? Which schools are doing a good job and which are not? What accounts for good test scores and what does this tell us about how we should teach? All such questions can be answered by a reliable system of testing—or so we are told.
Tests will also force teachers to stick to the curriculum, especially once they know that their performance will be judged according to how well or badly their students do on the tests. If the tests are well designed, they will inevitably improve the overall quality of schooling. They will also give parents and students a reliable and objective indicator of achievement. No more “Tom is doing as well as can be expected” or “Dorothy is performing below expectations,” or wondering just what a B or a C+ means. Now there will be a mark, easily understood and objectively accurate.
These arguments have led provincial governments in the past few years to return to some type of provincial examinations. No province has restored the old one hundred percent sudden-death approach of external examinations in all subjects. Instead, they specify certain grade levels, often only certain subjects, notably mathematics and literacy, with other subjects being tested in rotation; and they include a percentage of school marks, ranging from seventy percent in the lower grades to fifty percent in the higher, in students’ final marks. In Ontario and Manitoba these provincial tests begin as early as grade three and are timed for what are seen as important breaks in students’ school life, usually grades three, six, nine and twelve.
