Standardized tests have been cancelled — for now — for almost 200,000 students across the province whose schools have been hit by work-to-rule labour action or strikes.

For the first time in the almost 20-year history of the EQAO, the province’s testing body warned that unless there’s labour peace with teachers, tests won’t go ahead in those boards.

“For parents, I think they’ll be deprived of good, valuable, objective information about how their son or daughter is doing” in the assessments given to students in Grades 3, 6 and 9, said Bruce Rodrigues, head of the province’s Education Quality and Accountability Office, or EQAO.

Without data from more than two-thirds of the province’s elementary students, “it will affect our cohort tracking, for sure” and would impact the overall “reliability and validity of statistics, provincially.”

Across the province, elementary teachers in English public boards have launched work-to-rule action, meaning they won’t prepare students for or administer the tests, held between May 25 and June 5.

They teach 183,000 Grades 3 and 6 students out of the total 269,000 scheduled to write the tests in reading, writing and math.

Education Minister Liz Sandals said she is “concerned” with the elementary teachers’ job action, calling the testing “an important assessment for students, parents, educators, and the public as we work to close the student achievement gap in Ontario.”

Some 8,400 Grade 9 students in the Durham, Peel and Rainbow/Sudbury public boards, won’t write the math assessment if their teachers remain on the picket lines. Those tests were scheduled to be written between May 28 and June 12.

Students in schools and boards not hit by labour strife — the province’s 29 Catholic and 12 French/French Catholic boards — will go ahead in all grades as planned.

Tests are normally sent to schools this week and next, but delivery has been put on hold for the affected boards.

Elementary students typically write the tests in six, one-hour sessions, usually over four to five days.

Teacher unions, which have long argued for the EQAO to be scaled back or even eliminated, argue teachers’ own assessments have more value than the $32-million-a-year tests.

“The cancellation of the Grades 3 to 6 tests in public elementary schools this year will provide the government, school boards and parents with the opportunity to see how students focus on their learning without the distraction of the EQAO tests,” said Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario.

Rodrigues, however, said evidence shows teachers use the results to help students, and schools and boards use them in improvement planning.

Even though elementary teachers are not taking part in central bargaining talks, he said, “we remain optimistic that we’ll see some kind of concession made or something at the table negotiated so we could have the option of having students write” the tests.

School boards have said that without the co-operation of teachers, there’s no way they can administer the tests, which teachers have dubbed “evil questions attacking Ontario.”

Unaffected is the Grade 10 literacy test, which teens wrote in March.

Correction – May 20, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the number of Grade 9 students who are scheduled to write the EQAO test.

Standardized test impact:

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About 269,000 students were expected to write the Grade 3 and 6 assessments this year. Should the labour turmoil continue, just 86,000 will do the tests.

Almost 82,000 students were expected to write the Grade 9 math assessment this year. Because of strikes in three boards, about 15,600 won’t be writing.

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