School divisions keep standard test results secret

Critics say parents have a right to know

Parents can see their own children’s results on provincewide standardized tests, but finding out how they compare to other students is a lot more difficult.

Of Winnipeg’s school divisions, only River East-Transcona makes its test results public.

Angela Jamieson, a spokesperson for Manitoba Education, Citizenship and Youth, said it’s not mandatory for school divisions to publicize test scores.

St. James-Assiniboia School Division Supt. Ron Weston said parents have access to their children’s scores, but beyond that, test results are kept internal.

“We consider it an internal document – we don’t aggregate and put it out,” he said.

Winnipeg School Division also keeps its results private.

A spokesperson was unavailable to explain why.

Rodney Clifton, a professor in the faculty of Education Administration Foundations and Psychology at the University of Manitoba, thinks it should be mandatory to release the provincial standard test results.

“The government could easily force more accountability on this issue if they tied it to capital funding,” said Clifton.

Weston said one of the reasons the St. James-Assiniboia info is not made available is to prevent competition between schools, which he says isn’t the point of standardized testing.

“Competition between schools is the contentious issue, but there’s a lot more to it than saying ‘this school got a 70’ and ‘this school got an 80’,” he said.

The results of the tests, said Weston, help St. James-Assiniboia to find the root cause of problems or trouble spots and gives the division an idea of which areas need to be improved to give students the best quality of education available,” he said

Jamieson said senior managers with Education, Citizenship and Youth will meet with each division this year to find ways to improve student achievement.

Ron Schuler, the Progressive Conservative education critic, applauded the River East-Transcona Division for publicizing the results of the tests.

But he said standardized tests are a touchy subject.

“I’m a little uneasy if we start comparing division to division,” he said. “It’s a tool to figure out how you are doing and that is really the decision for each individual division.”

Schuler said the test scores help politicians to determine which areas require more funding.

“It allows us as policy makers at the provincial level to start looking at perhaps we have to start putting more money and resources in certain areas.”

– With files from Trish Hogue.