Trustees at Peel District School Board are asking the Ministry of Education to suspend EQAO tests for all students this year in the wake of its plans to review curriculum and how pupils are assessed.

In a motion approved at a board meeting Tuesday night, the trustees also urged other school boards throughout the province and the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association to support its request.

Given the province-wide review, the motion to cancel EQAO tests in math, reading and writing for students in Grades 3, 6 and 9 “makes perfect sense,” says Peel chair Janet McDougald.

Ontario’s second-largest school board has become increasingly worried that current tests administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) don’t accurately reflect what its students are learning in the classroom, McDougald said in an interview Wednesday.

The trustees’ move comes a month after Ontario announced an “education refresh” that will include revamping curriculum and report cards as well as rethinking standardized testing.

While Education Minister Mitzie Hunter indicated in a statement that the tests will proceed as planned, the Peel motion has already reignited the debate about the explosive topic of standardized testing.

Unions representing elementary and high school teachers, who want the current system of large-scale testing eliminated, applauded the Peel request, while other educators stressed that while no test instrument is perfect, the EQAO is an important measure of what skills students are mastering.

“During this review, it’s important that parents are still receiving information about how their child is doing at school,” Hunter said in a statement. “That’s why EQAO will continue to provide relevant information to better support student achievement and well-being.”

The Ontario Public School Boards’ Association did not respond directly to the Peel trustees’ request for support because it needs more information, said president Laurie French.

“However, the reality is that EQAO has been in place for 20 years and a comprehensive review is overdue,” she said in a statement.

That was also the message in the association’s discussion paper on EQAO testing released last spring, which, among other recommendations, called for the province to consider alternatives to across-the-board tests such as randomized testing of a sample of students.

“This is an important issue and we look forward to participating in that conversation,” said French.

McDougald said the Peel board has long been concerned about “a disconnect” between student report cards and EQAO scores, particularly in math, and met with EQAO staff earlier this year to try to get to the bottom of it.

While a strategy to improve literacy results led to significant improvement, three years of intensive focus on math has not improved scores on the provincial test, she said.

“We do not believe the test is capturing what the children are learning.”

While reading and writing results improved at the board this year, math results have declined in line with the provincial trend. Last year, only 63 per cent of Peel students met the standard in Grade 3, dropping to a dismal 49 per cent by Grade 6. Province-wide, 62 per cent of Grade 3 students were successful while only half of those in Grade 6 met the standard.

McDougald said putting the tests on hold during the review is reasonable because of the weight put on the results by everyone from parents choosing schools to real estate agents using them to attract homebuyers to certain neighbourhoods.

“It’s the only public assessments people see and we’re fine with that … as long as those assessments are relevant and fair to students.”

The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario welcomes the motion, said president Sam Hammond. The union has long supported eliminating EQAO testing, arguing it is costly, puts stress on students and diverts resources and teaching time that could be used more effectively to engage them in the classroom.

“If they suspended it for this year, teachers across the province would not be teaching to the test as they always do and would have much more time to teach in a much deeper way,” he said.

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Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, said Peel “has taken a very responsible position on this at a time when the dubious value of the EQAO is being called even more into question.”

However, Wilfrid Laurier University economics professor David Johnson argues the universal tests are a cost-effective way of measuring student achievement in basic skills.

All measurement instruments are imperfect, says Johnson, a policy scholar with the C.D. Howe Institute, who says it’s important to audit any public system for its effectiveness, whether it’s health care or education.

He says, on balance, EQAO “still provides a good index of how a school is functioning in terms of meeting curriculum demands” and allows schools and boards to compare results.